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Evolution of Immortality 



BY 

ROSICRUCI^E 

Author of " The Rosy Cross," "Principles of 
Nature and of Life," etc. 



We are haunted by an ideal life, and it is because we have within 
us the beginning and the possibility of it. — Phillips Brooks. 



> > 

> > > > 



EULIAN PUBLISHING COMPANY 
SALEM, MASS. 



YTIJATHOMMi TO WOITUJOV* 

41065 _^ c 1 



Library of Con^reti 

fwo Copies Received 
AUG 31 1900 

Cof yrt'jht entry 






No. 



SECOND COPY. 

DfMver*d to 

ORDER DIVISION, 



1R^ 



«r 



Copyright, 1900 
By Eulian Publishing Company 



All rights reserved 



DEDICATION : 

TO THE 

QUEEN OF THE ROSY CROSS, 

"SHE WHO IS NAMELESS," 

Whose Symbol is O — the Mystic Guardian of the 
"SACRED SEVEN, 1 ' 

ARE THE FOLLOWING PAGES MOST RESPECTFULLY 
DEDICATED BY 

THE AUTHOR. 



PREFACE. 



The following pages have been written primarily for the 
benefit of the free-thinking, fearless members of the Rosy 
Cross, who despise the world's way of hiring its thinking done 
for it ; and secondly, for those who would think for themselves 
if the impetus to do so were once given. As for the great 
mass of non-thinking cowards who form the debris of mankind, 
out of which comes the bloody work of war, the festering 
crimes, and the diseases of the present age — for them there is 
no present hope for immortality. 

There are good and noble souls who, still matter-bound, will 
claim that I am " dancing in the air," which opinion I shall 
receive as a compliment, since he who can dance in air is 
dancing in spirit, and is nearer to freedom than they who, 
tree-like, are rooted in the solid earth. 

To such I commend the consideration of the soul as a seed 
enveloped in matter, the fruit of which is immortality. 

We have not eaten freely of this fruit because the way to the 
tree of life has been, and is still, guarded by the "flaming 
sword " of fear, which sends forth forked tongues of the flame 
of divine wrath from every conventicle, church, mosque, and 
cathedral throughout the whole wide world. 

In much love, 

THE AUTHOR. 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER I 
The Divinity of Energy 9 

CHAPTER II 

The Evolution of Consciousness . . . .22 

CHAPTER III 
The Incarnation of Life 40 

CHAPTER IV 
The Power of Love 59 

CHAPTER V 
The Force of Truth 79 

CHAPTER VI 
The Wisdom of the Serpent 108 

CHAPTER VII 
Christ, the Light of Immortality . . . .122 

APPENDIX 
The Rosy Cross ........ 130 



EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY. 



CHAPTER I. 

THE DIVINITY OF ENERGY. 

The human mind is bounded by itself. It can- 
not transcend itself, or work outside its own en- 
ergies. 

The continually changing forms of things gives 
rise in the mind to ideas of a beginning, and in 
speculating on nature's activities, a beginning is 
always predicated of her work. 

As all works of man have a maker, we childlike 
predicate a maker for this wonderful timepiece, 
the universe, in which intelligence is so manifest 
and in which we appear, to ourselves, to be an 
important factor. 

It is folly to assume an external or foreign 
power as creative, when there is everywhere man- 
ifest in nature a living force which permeates all 

9 



IO EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY, 

things, being within and of them instead of out- 
side of them. 

The existence of energy is self-evident, and its 
duration is eternal, " from everlasting to ever- 
lasting," for in its fullness it is the Great God him- 
self. It is complete, and contains within itself all 
qualities, powers, parts, and attributes of things, 
aye, even the whole of things. 

We do not say a wise or good energy as we 
say a wise or good man, but man without energy 
can be neither wise nor good. It is self-existent 
and omnipresent, and no conception of inactivity 
exists or can exist in relation to it. 

The vast, boundless, fathomless expanse of 
space is pervaded by this incomprehensible and 
formless spirit, or energy. Although incompre- 
hensible, we live by contact with it and partake of 
it in all living functions, as in breathing, eating 
and drinking, thinking and speaking, sleeping and 
waking, living or dying, we are one with it. We 
can only know of its methods of action, of its 
creative processes by careful study of the only 
book it has given us, — the Word, the voice of 
nature. 

Time was forever. It has no beginning and 



THE DIVINITY OF ENERGY. II 

no end ; and while it may divide into past, present, 
and future, it still remains the present one and 
now. The present has no beginning nor end; 
the past is not lost ; and the future is never here, 
although continually beginning. The eternal now 
is always here for contemplation and criticism. 

Observation of the working of nature shows a 
division of powers, principles, and forces, demon- 
strating that a great law of existence is dependent 
on division, or the separation of the concrete into 
the individual. It is not a division of time when 
things were not, for such a state is inconceivable. 
The past is as inconceivable as the future ; it is 
brought forward and objectified in the living 
present, and we are in and of it. 

Energy was never inactive ; there was never a 
place nor time where and when things were not. 
It divides itself into life and death, but life is first 
in order of appearance, since things must live be- 
fore they can die. Energy abounds more in the 
former than in the latter condition, demonstrating 
that the first principle in any division is fuller of 
energy than those that come later. For example, 
the manifestation of life is due to the attraction 
and repulsion of energy, but attraction is first and 



12 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY. 

the principal force in its development. To attrac- 
tion is due the mating of the sexes and the growth 
of the foetus in the womb, nor does repulsion man- 
ifest until the child is fully matured. The infer- 
ence is logical that the first manifestation of energy 
is a drawing together, a suction, the concentrative 
and accumulative force, the female principle of 
life. To that negative female principle is due the 
contraction of diffusive energy into centers, as 
worlds, suns, stars, and souls of all animate life. 

The formless and apparently lifeless space in 
which worlds float like atoms in a sunbeam, which 
surrounds all worlds and all atoms, holding them 
tenderly but firmly in place, is an infinite womb, 
in which the powers of energy are divided into 
the opposing elements of life and death, day and 
night, body and mind, male and female, and all 
opposites. Between them, enthroned in unap- 
proachable mystery and glory of conscious living 
fire, sits the Energy, which says, " I am that I am." 

This division of energy must not be considered 
as absolute, but more in the nature of differentia- 
tion, since absolute division would admit of only 
the two opposing principles, which would instantly 
fuse and become one, if some balancing force 



THE DIVINITY OF ENERGY. 1 3 

were not between them. Water may be used in 
illustration. If divided it must be held apart by 
some other substance than itself, although all sub- 
stance has water in itself as a component element. 
But there is another kind of division, qualified, 
impermanent, as when the waters of the ocean are 
divided into waves by the wind. The waves are 
still water in the form of waves. It is thus with 
energy. Divided into motion and inertia it is still 
energy, although not the great unfathomable deep 
where motion is unknown. 

Out of the bosom of energy comes the spirit 
which moves on the face of the waters, as the 
breath of life, foreshadowed in the story of creation. 
All known forms of life gestate in water, and the 
waters referred to in Genesis on the face of which 
the spirit moved are that incomprehensible energy 
out of which odic force emanated, a magnetic 
current instinct with life. 

The soul in man is his firmament dividing the 
upper waters of intelligence from the lower waters 
of impulse, passion, and lust, a center in being 
from which is derived the sense of above and be- 
low, or of the opposing elements in all nature. 
Without the soul, standing between good and 



14 



EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY. 



evil, or opposing forces, man could not be a pro- 
gressive being. It is through the soul that energy 
enters, and from it exhales the spirit which reveals 
the quality of the man. This firmament, this soul, 
declared to be the " heavens," is not in the skies, 
but is where the great Master located it when he 
affirmed that "the kingdom of heaven is within 
you. 

Truth, the soul of action, lies hidden beneath 
the rubbish of all human life. Around it clusters 
the best thought of the race and toward it all life 
tends as to " the Father's house/' when it shall 
have " shuffled off this mortal coil." 

What more beautiful symbol of love than " the 
Father's house " ; the beginning of family ; a cen- 
ter in which the Father dwells ; an object lesson 
in creation ; a center of love from which go forth 
the inhabitants of worlds, and the truth of love 
and its demonstrations of power? It is in the 
Father's house that the human soul finds rest, if 
there is any for it on earth. In this incubator of 
life, warmed by the fires of parental love, truth is 
born, the light of intelligence is kindled and 
fanned to a blaze which may become the light of 
the world. 



THE DIVINITY OF ENERGY. 15 

The Father's house is the soul of civilization, 
the nerve center of the body politic. From it 
radiates society, nations, governments, literature, 
art, and religion. 

All power draws to centers. Wealth seeks cities 
and banks ; governments center in kings or par- 
liaments ; parties have their conventions and man- 
agers ; religion its head center in an idea and its 
nerve centers in its clergy. These centers are all 
souls from which radiate life and the energy to 
fashion, to mold, to bind together, and to break 
in sunder. There is no power which does not 
develop a center of influence, and such centers are 
souls of the elements so drawn to a focus. To 
put it briefly : the concentrated energies that 
combine to form an organization is its soul. The 
soul of a manufactory is the executive genius who 
works only through thought. He sits in his office 
while the agents of his intelligence rush here and 
there, rays of his thought, and the roaring ma- 
chinery is instinct with the music he makes. The 
force of the entire plant centers in him ; the effort 
of toil, steam, and machinery centers in the un- 
known and incomprehensible mind of the execu- 
tive, which silently stands between and controls 



1 6 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY. 

the play of forces, and the inertia born of silence 
and rest. There is a point in the soul which 
moves not, a point out of which a fire rises whose 
light is intellect and whose heat is love. From 
this central point all soul activities rise, irradiating 
the mind and manifesting power through all the 
machinery of life. 

The soul is but a bubble on the ocean of en- 
ergy, " the waters " of Genesis, and out of this 
bubble the spirit, heat (love), issues and moves 
upon the waters, but this heat does not immedi- 
ately evolve fire, or the light of mind. Love and 
the involuntary powers precede the evolution of 
intellect and the voluntary powers. Thus man is 
by nature a feeling and impulsive being before he 
is an emotional and reasoning soul ; but he is 
neither body, soul, nor mind, but an undying 
energy which stands between and manifests as the 
third element in all dual relations, or what to the 
senses seem so. 

The senses of the soul form a sort of timepiece 
which registers the effects which follow the pass- 
ing to and fro of the pendulum of energy, from life 
to death, from consciousness to unconsciousness. 
Consciousness may be regarded as a wheel in this 



THE DIVINITY OF ENERGY. I J 

timepiece which man must adjust from time to 
time as he adjusts the alarm in a clock, that the 
report of time may be accurate and compel atten- 
tion. Unconsciousness may be likened to a dark 
closet below the clock into which the soul de- 
scends, and, closing the door, shuts out all sensa- 
tion as one excludes the light, leaving a room in 
darkness. 

Man is aware of himself and of all things exter- 
nal through the mind ; and as mind is dependent 
on energy for existence and consciousness, the way 
to life and immortality must lie along the develop- 
ment of fuller power to receive and radiate en- 
ergy. The power to radiate energy is as neces- 
sary as the capacity to receive, for the man who 
holds within himself all that he receives of life, 
love, and power can have little consciousness of 
anything but himself. To such persons much 
suffering and countless crucifixions are necessary 
to enlarge their sympathy with suffering and 
bring to flower the seeds of love planted in every 
soul. The soul is feeling, emotion ; the mind is 
thought and the storehouse of knowledge. The 
small soul and mind cannot contain much and they 
attract little, for attraction is in proportion to re- 
ceptivity. 



1 8 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY. 

The ancients worshiped the stars as gods, 
ascribing certain qualities to them and the control 
of certain human activities. The idea had its in- 
ception in a great truth, viz., that man has within 
himself the greatest potency, the fullest degree of 
energy of any creation, and thus they naturally 
associated him with the most perfect forms, and 
embodied him in the stars. Have we any loftier 
conceptions of deity than the ancients ? Which 
is preferable, an infinitude of gods, or two, one of 
which is good and the other evil, as the Persians 
conceived, or our own one God, always at war 
with the universe he has created ? The ancients 
taught that the stars were once human souls which 
had so far evolved and perfected themselves as to 
have attained oneness of energy wherein all power 
may be exercised by the will. They taught that 
to reach this condition man must pass the gate 
open only to pairs ; the divided energy, in male 
and female, must become again one. Antago- 
nisms of thought must be indrawn so that the 
mind might become a receptacle of spirit, the 
mind being the male principle, while form, the fe- 
male principle, must lose its angularities and be 
rounded to a sphere. Energy, no longer divided, 



THE DIVINITY OF ENERGY. 



19 



became one in mind and form, blended with truth 
as a creative force, never to be sundered. 

Marriage is only a symbol of this perfect blend- 
ing of form and mind, when each shall have 
reached the acme of dual progression. 

Energy contains within itself every conceivable 
object, emotion, and thought. The process of 
creation is simply projection into time and space 
of that which is indrawn. Thus man in a spiritual 
state of being can take any form he desires, from 
that of a worm to that of a star. The two, which 
have become one, may draw forms, souls, minds, 
ideas, circumstances, and events from that infinite 
storehouse of energy which our angular, harsh 
word God but feebly symbolizes. 

The earth is a soul in which the male and fe- 
male principles have combined or flowed together 
as the waves subside into the still waters of the 
great deep. This perfect union attracts and re- 
ceives the infinite energy in a continuous flowing 
current of force. 

When the perfected soul whose earth name was 
Jesus came to humanity out of the soul world, he 
declared that he was the Light of Life and the 
Way to immortality. Why? Because he could 



20 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY. 

affirm from positive knowledge, " I and the Father 



are one!' 



Mastery over bodily sensations is gained by 
union of mind and soul in one positive will. 
Sensation may be drawn from one part and con- 
centrated in another, or it may be entirely sus- 
pended. Between every two principles there is a 
third, the point where action and reaction touch, 
and that third factor, without which the two could 
not manifest, is energy. There is no absolute 
duality; the triune is the form of all manifestation ; 
although the third factor may elude investigation, 
it is always present. 

When soul and mind are perfectly blended man 
becomes the arbiter of his own destiny in a con- 
scious and voluntary exercise of his powers. The 
present physical body is corruptible and the with- 
drawal of the astral body leaves it to disintegrate ; 
but in the higher stages of progress when man 
has become one, by the union of the perfected 
spiritual nature with his feminine counterpart, thus 
completing the quarternary -f- of existence, the 
blending of two perfected souls into one elongated 
sphere or fire body, it is not subject to decay or 
corrupting change. This fire body may take to 



THE DIVINITY OF ENERGY. 21 

itself any form the soul chooses to superinduce 
about it, and in appearance may walk the earth 
in the form of ordinary manhood ; but as this 
body is projected from the real self of being it 
may at anytime be again indrawn and never "see 
corruption." This is the body in which Jesus 
dwelt on the earth, which could die in appearance 
but could not see corruption. 

There is no impossibility to the being filled 
with divine energy and at one with its spirit and 
power. Jesus is " the Way, the Truth and the 
Life," not so much by what he is reported to have 
said as by the testimony of his life, death, and 
resurrection. It was no phantom body which he 
subjected to the test of taking food and being 
touched and handled, but that which by virtue of 
his spiritual advance beyond the ordinary man he 
could project or indraw at will. 



22 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY. 



CHAPTER II. 

THE EVOLUTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS, 

In the study of nature a variety of natures 
attract attention. Why should human nature 
claim precedence over all others ? " Who knoweth 
the spirit of man that it goeth upward and the 
spirit of a beast that it goeth downward ? " The 
same law operates in both, for all life is one ; 
the form that it manifests is of value only as 
showing the station at which the life has arrived 
on its evolutionary journey. 

What is evolution ? Is it something coming 
out of nothing? Whither is it bound? Life 
comes in and goes out of matter as the breath 
comes and goes ; but whither ? If evolved from 
matter it must in the last evolvement be free from 
matter. 

In a burning pile heat, light, and smoke escape, 
leaving at last only cold ashes, but these ashes are 
no more lifeless than was the wood before burn- 
ing. The phenomenon of fire is the motion that 



THE EVOLUTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 2$ 

the life of the wood makes in its escape, or in its 
evolution from inertia to — what ? 

Does it return again to inertia ? By no means. 
It divides itself into flame, smoke, heat, sound, 
and ashes, and in each is more of life than the 
wood held prior to the conflagration. 

We cannot, however, measure or weigh life. 
It is spirit, of which light, heat, and vapor are 
elements of various degrees of density and of 
motion. 

The spirit of man is perceived as white light. 

Life is active and inactive, conscious and un- 
conscious, mind and matter. In passing from 
one form of life to another motion is evolved, and 
hence to understand nature and life we must 
study the laws of motion. All motion describes 
a circle ; there is no such thing as a straight line. 
In combustion the motion is analogous to breath- 
ing, and the outgoing of hot and the ingoing of 
the cool air, like the inspiration and expiration 
of the breath, describe an ellipse. The original 
cause of the motion is not easily perceived, for 
living as we do in a series of effects which are 
also causes, it is difficult to retrace the series and 
find the origin of any motion. When we think 



24 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY. 

we have reached the cause of phenomena, further 
investigation proves that we have at best only 
another effect of some precedent cause. Every 
effect is in itself a cause of further effects, and we 
may conclude that life also comes under the same 
law, being both cause and effect. If this is true 
we need not look outside of the life within us for 
the cause of what we are, or of what we do, 
neither for the cause of that which we may be- 
come. 

Causes are perceived when we understand the 
combination of their effects, for nothing exists in 
complete isolation, all are interwoven and inter- 
dependent. The motion of one disturbs the entire 
economy, and on analysis the cause of the motion 
will be found in a series, or combination of effects 
centered in that which moves. 

There is a trinity of which each member is so 
interdependent that neither can exist without the 
other, viz., space, matter, and motion. 

Nothing can exist without motion and space to 
move in, nor can there be motion without some- 
thing to move, and that object forms a center 
in space from which arises the perception of 
a circumference. The mind takes cognizance 



THE EVOLUTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 



25 



only of the limited ; the unlimited is beyond 
thought. 

To discover the origin or cause of this self- 
existent trinity is beyond our power. To assume 
that this trinity is self-existent and eternal is as 
logical as to assume an uncreated deity outside 
of this trinity who has the same self-existence and 
endless duration. 

Motion is necessary to the development of life, 
whether in animate or inanimate nature, and is 
most apparent in the sensitive and volatile parts 
of things. Space itself is motionless, but it is a 
component of everything that moves. It is be- 
tween every organ of all bodies and every atom 
of matter, and while each atom moves in space, 
that remains motionless. 

All energy draws into centers. Worlds are 
centers of energy and they are living beings, with 
souls which are inert, silent, and motionless, but 
which hold with unyielding grasp to the universe 
of souls which surround them, and with which an 
exchange of energy or spirit is effected, as the 
air gives itself to fire. 

Motion causes heat, and inversely heat causes 
motion. One must precede the other, but if life 



26 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY. 

is latent where there is no apparent motion, by 
observation we may perceive the beginning of its 
manifestation. 

Heat is evolved from matter by pressure. The 
center of gravity is the soul of the earth ; and as 
the earth revolves on its axis all the fluids and 
gases are forced toward the center, crowded to- 
gether with such pressure as to develop intense 
heat, which, occasionally finding vent, bursts forth 
in volcanoes. 

If a bucket of water is swung swiftly in the air 
over the head, as long as the circular motion is 
kept up not a drop will be spilled. So gases and 
volatile substances, flung into space, form vortices, 
or rush to a center, cooling and hardening into 
a circumference as the rotary motion is continued, 
and worlds are evolved. 

We discover, therefore, that the third law of 
motion is revolution, the form of motion that 
holds every atom in place. 

The revolution of the earth on its axis causes 
attraction, suction, a centering of force the ulti- 
mate of which is inertia. Matter becomes of great 
density toward the center of the earth ; its specific 
gravity is greatly increased and more intense heat 
is developed. 



THE EVOLUTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 



2 7 



To get a conception of the enormous weight 
pressing on the earth's center it is only necessary 
to know that there is a pressure of fifteen pounds 
on every square inch of its surface. The increas- 
ing ratio of pressure on the center produces an 
almost inconceivable degree of heat and density, 
which arrests all motion. If the pressure were 
withdrawn for an instant from the surface of the 
earth it would vanish like smoke, leaving no trace 
behind. 

Professor Milne estimates the increase of weight 
per square inch of the earth's surface, two hun- 
dred miles toward its center, at six hundred tons 
instead of fifteen pounds as on the surface. The 
atoms of the earth's surface move around its 
axis at the rate of over one thousand miles per 
hour, but as the center is approached the velocity 
grows less and less, until at the central point of its 
mass rotation ceases. There is another motion, 
however, that of the whole mass of the earth 
around the sun, — an equal revolution of every 
atom around the great luminary, which causes the 
outward or centrifugal motion. This motion is the 
expiration of the earth, its outgoing breath of life, 
and is a positive electric force as it goes out, re- 



28 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY. 

turning as a negative magnetic current. The out- 
going breath is flame from the central fire of 
energy and scatters sparks, that gradually cool as 
they recede from the center. Those deposited at 
the circumference form the crust of the earth, or 
become the bodies of animate nature. 

Thus evolution and revolution carry on the work 
of creation. Study that work as it goes on in the 
formation of an Ggg and the evolution of a chick. 
In the dark and secret chamber of the mother 
body the same methods and laws are operative as 
in the creation and evolution of worlds. 

First, attraction of the male germ to the vacant 
procreative cell, which is the soul of the future 
living being. This cell is globular in form and 
motionless, as the point in a magnet where the 
positive and negative forces separate, or the point 
of perfect equilibrium in the lungs where the in- 
drawn breath deposits its accretion of life and 
turns back, as the outgoing breath, to the atmos- 
phere again. The nuclear point in the cell is 
matter and spirit in union, undivided energy, the 
one. The cell is a womb which attracts the im- 
pregnating atom as the soul attracts the vivifying 
energy by its emptiness, inviting to fullness and 



THE EVOLUTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 29 

expansion. The nature . of attraction is to press 
together, to clasp, to embrace, generating heat, 
which disintegrates the matter in which the seed 
is imprisoned, causing division and separation of 
the atoms of matter in which it is held. With the 
freedom thus obtained the living spark begins to 
burn, to breathe from itself, and two forces begin 
to play instead of one alone, viz., attraction and 
repulsion. Attraction has made the center for the 
germ of the new being ; repulsion carries the 
coarser matter to the circumference to form the 
shell, the finer to form the body of the chick, each 
atom finding its place through attraction. 

" Behold, I show you a mystery." The chick 
exists in still life, or negative spirit, long prior to 
the impregnation of the cell. Its phantom form, 
silent, intangible, takes its place in the perfect egg, 
drawn thither by attraction, and in motionless rest 
awaits the pressure of heat from the body of the 
mother to kindle the fire of life at the center, from 
which matter is evolved to clothe the phantom 
form. 

Note that the germ in the egg is at rest until 
heat from another body rouses motion, and that 
the motion is dual, attraction and repulsion, or 



3<D EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY. 

involution and evolution. But neither of these 
motions can exist without revolution. These mo- 
tions are first on the interior or spirit plane, for 
every cell has an aura, or spirit atmosphere, sur- 
rounding it in which the motions described are 
continually playing ; and when a cell is sufficiently 
developed to be self-poised, or centered, its atoms 
move in the same manner. 

The law is one, and the methods are the same 
in the building of a cell or the evolution of a 
world. Energy, in order to manifest, centers a 
portion of itself, and out of this division are evolved 
all forms of motion. 

The heat which is constantly exhaling from the 
earth is matter dissolved by fire, the kindling point 
of which is at the center of gravity, where motion 
is not. Energy, the inbreathing force, is dis- 
charged, and, rushing again to the surface, the 
breath of the earth comes laden with devitalized 
spirit. 

The vital point in an object is that where force 
culminates ; when all ways unite to produce the 
crowning effect, the striking of fire from a sub- 
stance hard as granite or solid as steel, or, in a 
spiritual sense, electrifying into life and intel- 



THE EVOLUTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 31 

ligence a soul as dense as the center of the 
earth. 

It was the warm breath of God breathed into 
Adam that caused him to become a living soul, 
when that center within was illuminated by the 
fire of living energy borne on the magnetic cur- 
rent to the center of being. 

It has been demonstrated that air can by pres- 
sure be liquefied, and by greater pressure can be 
converted into a solid, as water may be converted 
into ice by the pressure of intense cold. 

Air can also by expansion be rarefied and ex- 
panded into volatile gases by heat. Expansion 
of the atmosphere is greatest at the equator, where 
the earth's exhalations are then most vigorous, 
while at the poles inhalation is so powerful that 
the whirling atmosphere becomes liquid and then 
solid in its fearful rush for the center of the earth, 
where the pressure is so great that motion ceases 
and even fire itself is quenched, or indrawn. 

How intelligent, how enduring, how perfect are 
these self-supporting beings which we name suns, 
stars, and worlds ! They suggest infinity and the 
eternal, while we poor crawling insects on the 
surface of one of them doubt and deny the intelli- 



3 2 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY. 

gence of this mother who has borne us, and of 
that divine energy whose eyes of light and power 
are on us by night and by day. By suns and 
moons and stars humanity has been invited through 
countless ages to look up and learn from them 
the lesson of the self-sphered, self-supporting 
units of the universe. 

The small powers that man now has suggest the 
possibility of infinite acquisition. Why do I feel 
in all my being that I am f Because nature is truth 
and affirms that the great I am who is in and 
of this and all other worlds is the same as / am in 
essence, although infinite in degree. The spark 
within man is the same as that which blazes in 
the sun, and he is exhorted to use every effort 
to increase its brilliancy, working with, rather 
than against, the evolutionary forces for that 
end. 

Self-supporting power, self-poise is the acme of 
all attainment, the rounding out and perfection of 
being, which is completeness of evolution, for evo- 
lution is not from but in the nature to be per- 
fected. 

The mere evolution of families, nations, or 
worlds is not the perfecting of anything. The 



THE EVOLUTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 33 

race is no stronger than when it built the pyra- 
mids, nor wiser as the ages increase. 

Strength is not increased by division, or by un- 
equal development of parts. \ Nothing is made in 
vain, and all that is in human nature is needed in 
complete development to form the perfect man. 
One part of his nature cannot be perfected at the 
expense of another part.] 

There is evolution of lorm as well as of mind 
and morals. Excision will not rid us of angulari- 
ties or abnormal development of parts. The forces 
playing around and through us will return to us, 
for evolution ; everything so excised, and the good 
which is in all evil must be evolved, by putting it 
to its legitimate use. 

From division of energy comes the only fall of 
man. Death ensues from the weakness which is 
unknown in the one ; evil exists only after the 
division of energy, and the only antidote for the 
"fall" is to be found in the evolution of the good, 
or oneness, in man, which disintegrates, super- 
sedes, and scatters the evil. As we cannot get 
outside ourselves, evolution for us must begin 
and end within the nature we call human. Being 
is both tangible and intangible, seen and unseen. 



34 E VOL V TION OF IMMOR TALITY. 

Man is not merely a form ; he consists of acts 
which are spirit and flow out of him as the breath 
flows — his oversoul which he creates. These acts 
are the circumstances of his life, from which he 
cannot escape. They make him what he is, and 
by them he is judged. Acts are the real man in 
motion, — involuntary motion, like the motions of 
worlds. 

Life grand and beautiful is in all things, wait- 
ing to be evolved into consciousness. This in- 
herent life can only move, or come under the laws 
of motion, in its entirety, in form. No form 
is perfect which adheres to or vegetates on the 
surface of the earth. We say of " this straddling 
biped man," that he is the epitome of form. Alas 
for our conception of the perfect even in form ! 

A perfect form adjusts itself readily and naturally 
to the laws of motion, which are circular. Such 
form must be globular, which cannot be for a being 
who depends on the earth for a standing-place. 
Life as a whole is perfect, but it manifests in all 
kinds of imperfect forms, and evolution deals, not 
with the life, but the forms of its manifestation. 

The essential life-sustaining motions of the body 
are the same as those of the earth swinging in 



THE EVOLUTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 35 

space. Expansion and contraction, the out and 
in of attraction and repulsion, are analogous to 
breathing. 

There is not a throb of the heart or a muscular 
movement which does not operate in obedience 
to these laws. If man were perfect, the body would 
be free, without angles to prevent perfect revolu- 
tion. Angular forms move slowly, but the perfect 
form, the globular, is capable of inconceivably 
rapid motion, and has also immense power of 
resistance. 

Life divides into four primal forms of manifes- 
tation — animal, mental, spirit, and soul life. 

On the physical side, animal life includes all the 
forms of life in earth, air, and water ; spiritually, 
it includes the passions, or purely animal nature 
of man, which acts from instinct, or involuntarily. 
Man develops to a certain plane of life without 
conscious volition. 

On the animal plane he is more brutal than the 
beast of the field, because of his greater intelli- 
gence. Those on the animal plane are of two 
classes — the animal in act and the animal in 
thought. Those whose idea of justice is founded 
on retaliation, " an eye for an eye," blood for 



36 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY. 

blood, are not just, but vindictive, and have not 
evolved from the mental plane of the ravening 
wolf. Even those who have reached a higher 
mentality, professing to be governed by laws of 
right and justice, do not scruple to kill and eat 
of the flesh of animals. 

When conduct is regulated by legal enactments 
and the fear of punishment, life is mechanical, run 
by machinery of church or state, a condition of 
barter and sale when all work for wages and each 
one has his price. The system of church machi- 
nery is one of credit, pay day in some uncertain 
future after death, where God is the bookkeeper. 
The service is largely a system of prayer, song, 
and praise, the mainspring of which is duty and 
gain ; i.e., laying up of treasure in a future king- 
dom of heaven. The few who have grown out of 
forms into true spiritual life are strangers among 
men, are ostracized as fanatics, poisoned like Soc- 
rates, or crucified like Jesus. The life of Jesus, 
his apparent death and triumph over the grave, 
is an example of the evolution of the spiritual 
nature into power and splendor. 

The phenomena of spiritualism have established 
as a fact the continuous life of man. Death 



THE EVOLUTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 37 

changes him only from the visible material plane 
to the invisible material plane. In himself there 
is no change. 

Some of the so-called dead have the power to 
make themselves visible and tangible for a brief 
space of time, showing that there are degrees of 
knowledge and power the other side of death, just 
as there are on this side. 

We are spirits in this clay form just as surely 
as we shall be in any other form or condition, and 
being dead, we shall be in the same life we are 
now in ; if spiritual, a spiritual life ; if animal, an 
animal life. There is a distinction between having 
spiritual life within, and being in spiritual life. 
Spiritual life may burn within, while the outward 
life is in the animal plane, where death rules. 

There are two states of being, the visible and the 
invisible, the seen and the unseen worlds ; but 
both are in reality one, although divided. /, my- 
self stand between the two as the dividing factor, 
and I also am that which is divided. I live only 
in part and am alternately in and of each state. 
I am visible and also invisible, for I inhabit a vis- 
ible body and am myself invisible and intangible. 

These angular bodies we inhabit belong to the 



38 E VOL UTION OF IMMOR TALIT Y. 

animal life, but the astral, the invisible body is 
mental, evolved from our thought and action, and 
is of and in an invisible world. This mental body 
is an exact reproduction of the physical body, but 
differs from it in mobility and rapidity of motion, 
those which vibrate most rapidly being nearest to 
the spiritual state. 

These visible and invisible states are only separa- 
ble as / stand between them, being alternately in 
either until by will and increased motion an 
other state is evolved into conscious existence, first 
as an idea, a seed, around which all energy and 
thought revolve, expanding it so that the / can 
enter into it as into another life. 

Growth is toward freedom, and perfect freedom 
is spirituality. The mind which is untrammeled by 
tradition, or the opinions of others ; which is free 
from the dominion of the senses, from fear, care, 
or ambition, or pride, trembles on the verge of 
that creative power which speaks a new world 
into being. To create or to renew is as simple 
as to destroy. If a force exists which can instantly 
destroy the growth of centuries, the same power 
can in like manner produce any desired change. 

But in the weak nature of man power grows 



THE EVOLUTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 39 

slowly because there is a lack of appropriation of 
energy. That which is complete in body and mind 
is all energy, and can defy the lightning's flash and 
the earthquake's shock. 

To know is one form of power ; to be is quite 
another. Those possessed of the latter power may 
enter the soul world at will, in any form desired, 
or in no form at all. To spirit time has no dura- 
tion, space no limitation, and form no existence. 
It is unity, the all in one. 

This oneness can only be reached by the per- 
fect in form and in mind. The perfect form is a 
sphere ; the perfect mind is the union in one har- 
monious whole of all its discordant faculties and 
powers. 



40 E VOL UTJON OF IMMOR TALIT Y. 



CHAPTER III. 

THE INCARNATION OF LIFE. 

Where there is progression there must be ret- 
rogression, or at the least, the possibility of it. 

Persons who hold strongly to the idea of eter- 
nal progress are generally skeptical as regards 
reincarnation, some of them regarding it with 
positive disgust. 

That the ruler of beasts, aye, and of men, should 
be compelled to enter in the form of an animal 
and thus pass another life period on the earth 
shocks the sensibilities and arouses the most de- 
termined dissent. 

But there is no compulsion about it. A man 
is what he delights in, no matter what his form ; 
and he who delights in doing what gratifies the 
animal is already fashioning within himself the 
brute body he will enter and live in with pleasure, 
when the fullness of time frees him from the hu- 
man body. 

Beasts devour each other, the little fish are the 



THE INCARNATION OF LIFE. 4 1 

prey of the big ones. Men take advantage of 
the weakness of their fellows to rob and slay 
them, and doubtless would devour them bodily if 
the helpless animals were not more easily kept 
and fattened. If progression were the only law, 
then some men — shall I say many men ? — would 
certainly show forth its truth if elevated into the 
body and life of the brute creation. 

Retrogression is as much a truth as progres- 
sion, and the words are interchangeable with evo- 
lution and involution. If man by his own acts 
and thought involves himself in a network of 
circumstances which prove his ruin, the law oper- 
ates just as surely as it does in the case of the 
one whose network of circumstances are the evo- 
lution of noble thought and action. One destroys 
while the other creates. One retrogrades while 
the other progresses. To create pain, sorrow, 
loss, and humiliation is retrogressive, becoming 
involved in that which disintegrates and de- 
stroys, and whose ultimate is change into in- 
ferior forms. 

It is no punishment for one who is already in 
the life of a dog to take on the form of a dog, 
nor would a lamb or a dove be spiritually elevated 



42 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY. 

by taking on the form of man. Slaves can only 
exhibit and use the degree of freedom attained, 
and the highest degree of freedom is forfeited by 
a violation of the great law of love. When man 
abuses this law of his spiritual nature his soul 
trembles, arrested in its upward progress, and 
slowly turns toward descent by gradual loss of the 
power of thought and the germination of ideas. 

In evolution the horizon of the mind continu- 
ally expands, the light flows in in greater volume 
and brilliancy as the heavens roll away as a scroll, 
revealing new worlds, new natures, and new pow- 
ers, of which the animal man cannot so much as 
conceive. These are for him who hath eyes to 
see the things of the spirit. 

No one can get out of himself, nor be other 
than his thought makes him ; he may get out 
of his human body and still be in his own life, 
and that life creates a body corresponding to its 
nature. 

It does not follow that when a soul begins to 
retrograde it will go to the lowest deep, or that it 
must continue to descend, for a man may change 
the quality of his thought as he may his acts, and 
this change may be quickly or slowly made, in 



THE INCARNATION OF LIFE. 43 

accordance with his orbit and velocity of revo- 
lution. 

To think, with some, is the same as to act, so 
far as the spiritual nature is concerned ; with the 
coarser, slower nature a change of thought and 
its corresponding act is more difficult and labori- 
ous. Thought moves the will, but the will is 
feebly connected with gross forms of matter and 
slowly vibrating motions of mind. 

Reincarnation is not demonstrable by material 
facts, or testimony, for memory of previous con- 
ditions of being dies away from the soul, in a 
manner similar to the decay and death of the 
body. No one remembers the events of infancy. 
Yet all have been babies, and the form as then 
inhabited is not that in which the mature man 
manifests. So that the fact that we have no rec- 
ollection of a previous incarnation proves nothing 
against its probability. 

There is no sharp distinction between the hu- 
man and animal kingdom such as the " missing 
link" of Darwin suggests. Man has a survival 
in his nature of all the animal instincts, habits, 
and passions, and to suppose retrogression along 
those lines until submerged in the animal king- 



44 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY. 

dom is surely more in accord with the justice and 
love which we name Divine than to suppose that 
creative power is exercised in a way to make eter- 
nally wretched a large majority of the human 
family. The degenerates so well known in crim- 
inal jurisprudence are in the vortex of retrogres- 
sion, and are being rapidly whirled downward to 
the animal kingdom, where alone they are at home 
and wholly satisfied. What is the purpose of the 
creeping, crawling, swimming, walking, and flying 
life of the planet ? These creatures of such tran- 
sient being are all sentient, capable of pain and 
of bliss ; they exist for a brief season, multiply 
their kind, and disappear in the vortex of change. 
The purpose of the existence of these sparks 
of life is, on the whole, progression ; their goal is 
perfection. The perfect includes the all, and the 
spark of life can become perfect only when asso- 
ciated with all life, when each separate being con- 
tains within itself all that is. If man has evolved 
through all grades of being from the mineral atom 
to the human plane, he must hold in his composi- 
tion the spirit or residuum of knowledge thus 
gained. Being thus a combination of energies, it 
behooves him to hold fast to his gains nor pause 



THE INCARNATION OF LIFE. 45 

in the ascent lest retrogression set in, soul forces 
scatter, and he become again involved in all the 
elements of animal life, forced to climb again, 
slowly and laboriously, the ladder which leads to 
the stars. 

Freedom is of choice and will. It begins in an 
idea, around which the being revolves persistently 
throughout aeons of time and in countless forms, 
gaining little by little the freedom it seeks, free- 
dom to choose and will to execute. 

Man is a creator in proportion to his freedom 
of choice and power to execute, for energy flows 
swiftly and strongly in the union of these prin- 
ciples. 

The incomplete, the angular, the unnatural man 
cannot escape the indrawing force of incarnation 
if he would, for could he emerge into a sphere 
where all motion is rapid and powerful as the re- 
volving world's, where violence is unknown, where 
all is order and harmony of motion, legs, arms, 
and all useless appendages, all angularities of 
form would be whirled away, leaving nothing but 
the spherical head to show that an undeveloped 
man had prematurely entered that sphere. 

One revolution would be sufficient, for use de- 



46 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY. 

termines the organs of form, and with no earth 
on which to stand, no need for food, no desire to 
grasp, no opposition to arouse, of what use are 
arms, legs, hands, fists, stomachs, and bowels ? 
When the diplomat and the politician find their 
occupation gone, the part of the mind engaged 
in the arts or tricks of statecraft is decayed and 
useless. The so-called great would find them- 
selves out of balance and gladly return to the 
angular form in which their angularities of mind 
can best be accommodated. 

They who hunger for wealth, or worldly place 
and power, will naturally and inevitably return to 
their treasures, which are of and on the earth. 

Swedenborg saw into the astral world, or invis- 
ible life of this angular nature, but he did not see 
beyond the present form of man, when he de- 
clared that " the whole universe is in the form of 
man." His eyes were not opened to the eternal 
progression of forms until the perfect form, the 
sphere was reached. The all of nature is divided 
into parts. In one it crawls, in another it flies, in 
another it swims. There is a nature which takes 
root in the ground and is stationary, moving only 
with the revolution of the earth which breeds it, 



THE INCARNATION OF LIFE. 47 

and another, although fast at the roots, sways with 
each passing breeze and indraws the spirit of life 
in its own peculiar manner, as it vibrates with life. 

The nature of man differs from all these, but it 
is by no means certain that he is of the highest 
nature of all. The earth which gives birth to and 
supports these varied products is of quite a dif- 
ferent nature. Spherical in form, she moves in 
her orbit without wings, she swings through space 
without shudder, she breathes without lungs, she 
digests without a stomach. She has absorbed, 
indrawn all angularities of form and is in perfect 
harmony with her environment. Can she come 
under the laws of retrogression or has she evolved 
beyond their action ? She has reached perfection 
of form, and the harmonious adjustment of her 
forces points to a condition of eternal progression, 
but what finite mind can grasp and measure the 
destiny of worlds! 

A seed planted in the soil is involved in it, and 
the process of growth is carried on by the inward 
drawing, or attraction, exerted by the seed on the 
elements in which it is involved. 

The evolutionary force which pushes the plant 
out of the soil is not as strong as the forces in 



48 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY. 

the seed which attract moisture and nourishment. 
The tiny plant stands erect, boldly stretching forth 
its arms and clutching as with hands the vital 
energy it needs for development. 

The earth, air, water, sunlight are the condi- 
tions in which plant life is involved, and from 
which it extracts nourishment and perfects itself. 
If it bear fruit the spherical is the more common 
form, indicating the tendency toward perfection. 

Man differs little from vegetable life save in his 
power of freedom. The conditions surrounding 
him are soil, moisture, and heat, from which he 
reaches out with thought which lays hold on the 
stars, which lift him up among them, and he be- 
comes a god. The conditions which surround 
him are his horizon, above which rise the con- 
stellations of hope, ambition, pride, or despair, as 
lights to cheer or shadows to depress. 

Man has been called the child of circumstance, 
the plaything of fate ; but the truth is that man 
owns himself, and the circumstances which sur- 
round and enfold him shift and change as the 
wind blows. The man who governs himself shapes 
and fashions the conditions which are about him, 
through which his journey leads. Every motion 



THE INCARNATION OF LIFE. 49 

he makes is a new event evolved from himself, 
which makes another point of light in some con- 
stellation glowing in the firmament of his life. 

Energy does not enter from without except it 
be attracted by something within, even if that 
something be only a vacuum. The conditions 
surrounding a man are parts of his organization ; 
they were present at his birth as a body awaiting 
the entrance of a soul, but they are not fixed. 

We change bodies, but the change is first 
within ourselves, rather than in the external con- 
ditions. The attractive force is changed, so that 
the elements we do not desire no longer hover 
around and enter in the secret places of our loves 
and our will. We are more involved in our own 
acts and the conditions they create than in the 
acts of others, because we have begotten them. 

The experiences of life are all the store of real 
knowledge we have, and this knowledge involved 
in the consciousness becomes our spiritual life, 
thus entering into and becoming part and parcel 
of ourselves. We grow physically by the indraw- 
ing of air in the lungs and the essence of food in 
the body, and we grow mentally by indrawing 
thought, which is given birth by our acts. 



5<D EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY. 

The spirit of man is of similar nature and 
quality as his thought. He is not made of 
foreign substances, but of that to which he is 
closely related and with which he is in thorough 
accord, viz., that which he thinks about most 
constantly. 

He is involved in the things of his thought, 
and his only way of escape from that which he 
recognizes as evil is by becoming friends with it, 
by forgiving it, thus indrawing the force which at- 
tracts evil by putting it to sleep, or hypnotizing it. 
To indraw a passion, or a faculty of mind, is not 
to destroy it, but to render it inert, innocuous. 

Everything is of use if rightly placed. Legs 
are useful on the earth, but in the spiritual state 
where the will is the means of locomotion the 
legs, being useless, are indrawn. So it is with all 
irregularities of mind and character ; they are not 
lopped off, excised, but are indrawn, transmuted 
into the sphere, which is the form of the perfect 
man. 

In its proper place, performing its function of 
sentinel, fear is good ; but when it becomes a 
hypnotic power, injurious to health and happi- 
ness, the wise ruler of his house will silence 



THE INCARNATION OF LIFE, 5 I 

it, and by putting it to sleep indraw it. Next 
to love, fear has the greatest influence over the 
souls of men. Love is life, joy, warmth ; fear 
chills, paralyzes, destroys, and is in league 
with death itself. It is a fearful bondage, the 
exact opposite of that freedom of spirit which is of 
God. It has no place in the kingdom of heaven, 
and hence its transmutation is essential to the 
evolution of the perfect symmetrical man. 

Fear closes the door to that inner kingdom of 
heaven which no one has ever been scared into. 
The influence of fear may make more law-abiding 
citizens, but in proportion as the soul is appre- 
hensive of the wrath of God does it take hold on 
death, the very thing that it fears. 

The force which alone can indraw fear is love. 

The moral nature is the training-school of the 
spirit, and fear is the sentinel at the door to debar 
the wild beast nature from entering there. It 
restrains the untamed animal nature, but when 
that nature is thoroughly regenerated, not cast 
out but indrawn or transmuted, it disappears 
between the " lamb and the lion " which " lie down 
together." 

Violence is sometimes necessary to repel vio- 



52 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY. 

lence, but anger and cruelty are never necessary. 
They are abnormal or inflamed activities of force, 
and are the result of torpid justice and charity. 
The awakening of the love element absorbs or 
indraws the fierceness of the animal in man and 
arouses the charity which subdues and transmutes 
it. Love projected from the soul is replaced by 
that peace " which passeth all understanding." 

Difficulties are overcome by the evolution of 
energy into the conditions which surround us, 
thus improving our environments, but it is by the 
soul that feels rather than by any other agency 
that the change is effected. Ambition to be and 
to become more and more nerves us to effort and 
improvement. 

Love is the great equalizer, the universal sol- 
vent, a reservoir which is never full, a fire which 
devours all lesser forces, passions, and desires. 
He who is capable of evolving love from himself 
need fear no evil, for he is involved in good 
which is the germinating principle of immortality. 

The expansion and rounding out of being must 
be accomplished from within. It is not an exter- 
nal work except by the reactions of external con- 
ditions, for action affects less than reaction. 



THE INCARNATION OF LIFE. 53 

We are involved in the reactions of previous 
lives. We find conditions already prepared when 
we are born into this physical world. Tendencies 
to disease or crime we call heredity, thereby 
removing something of the sting by putting the 
responsibility on our ancestors — and on the 
Creator, as is the way of the fatalist. This is 
cowardly if we consider on whom we place the 
burden, and it is also a mistake if we fancy we 
derive our being from something foreign to our- 
selves. 

There is nothing foreign to infinitude, and we 
are infinite being. Time never began and can 
never end. The soul is always in time, has 
always been, and will be forever. Sometimes it 
is inert in rock or mineral. Sometimes in the 
life of the vegetable or the animal kingdom ; it 
may be a sunbeam has held it, or the dewdrop 
on a flower, or some wild beast of the jungle, or 
some glad bird whose native element is air. To 
and fro, out and in, has the soul passed through- 
out aeons of time, ignorant of whence it came or 
whither it was bound. 

Beginning and end there is none, and of the 
experiences of this eternity of being, of living and 



54 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY. 

dying we know nothing, although we are in it 
and of it, and cannot escape from its enfold- 
ment. 

Out of himself the Great God creates, and 
what he creates is within him, for he is the Bound- 
less, the All, and we are limited reflections of him. 
So alternately in rest and motion, rising and fall- 
ing, spirit and matter, visible and invisible, but 
always within ourselves, we revolve, we evolve, 
and as certainly involve the being we are, in the 
spirit of the acts we commit. As vapor becomes 
steam, steam becomes water, and water becomes 
ice, so does spirit, passing through experiences 
of which we are ignorant, by unknown proc- 
esses become thought and action, and by the 
same process inertia becomes motion, and mat- 
ter is transmuted into spirit. Whether active or 
inactive, conscious or unconscious, in the trans- 
mutation of all force / am between the opposing 
elements, superintending and controlling all man- 
ifestations. 

Thus / am connected with everything living or 
dead ; they are mine and I am theirs ; I have 
made them and their reactions have made me. 
Jesus was crucified for a statement of this truth, 



THE INCARNATION OF LIFE. 



55 



" If ye have seen Me at any time, ye have seen 
the Father. I and my Father are One." 

The idea of blood relationship is the falsehood 
of the ages, — a falsehood in which man has been 
involved throughout all historical time. 

Out of it has sprung the divine right of kings, 
the superiority of the firstborn, the bondage of 
aristocracies and of caste. It has set man against 
man, and involved the race in animosities and 
bloody warfare. The intrinsic idea in the hered- 
ities of "blue blood" is, "I am first, therefore 
better than you, and entitled to all that is best." 

Transmission of qualities from ancestry is true, 
but it is a partial truth only, for the secret of 
good blood, as of any good, lies in the love of 
good, not in pride of ancestry. The best inher- 
itance of blood can be vitiated by evil actions. 
Blood does not make the man, but the man 
makes the blood. Because a man comes into this 
existence by the way of a certain man's blood 
does not condemn him to be involved in it all his 
life. Each man is here because he chooses to be 
here ; he impels his parents to the act which 
made his advent possible. " The thought is father 
to the act." 



56 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY. 

The thought and will of the incarnating germ 
is the moving force of its manifestation, but the 
parents did not hold that eternal ego in mind 
until they became associated with it in physical 
life. Association is the greater part of blood 
relationship. 

The race is involved in blood until the very 
heavens are lurid with war. The orthodox atone- 
ment is one of blood, but the only purifier of 
blood is love, which evolves the Christ spirit into 
our environment, in which he who loves is in- 
volved, as in the kingdom of God, which is peace 
and good will. This is the work of every man, 
and his only way of salvation. 

We are involved in self-sufficiency, which holds 
at arm's length each one of us, — a thick darkness 
in which nothing is visible to each one but him- 
self. To ourselves we appear immense, — so im- 
mense as to imagine we can influence the Great 
God by prayers. To own, to hold large posses- 
sions of material things, to be at the head of the 
procession of society, is the grand aim. Thrones 
are established and palaces built, from which to 
rule, not ourselves, but others, for our own satis- 
faction and glory. This spirit prevails in halls of 



THE INCARNATION OF LIFE. 57 

legislation, on the bench of justice, in the pulpit, 
and in the courts alike. 

To strive for equality is manly and laudable. 
To be free, self-poised, and self-supporting is 
evidence of spiritual life evolving within us ; but 
to aim to rule another involves us in perpetual 
strife. Great wealth is apt to involve one in the 
spirit of pride and domination, with the acts which 
flow from that spirit. Lust for money is degrad- 
ing and destructive. 

To think kindly of others, to mingle with them 
in fellowship and friendly appreciation and for- 
bearance, to grieve with those who mourn, to give 
of our strength to the weak, — this is to involve 
ourselves in the spirit and acts which evolve true 
and noble manhood and womanhood. Although 
this spirit will build no thrones and erect no pal- 
aces, it will so equalize conditions that the whole 
earth may become a paradise, when all false dis- 
tinctions would cease forever. Freedom, which is 
the native air of the soul, is found in the whole, 
not in isolation or the separation of parts; but 
this oneness must exist first in each individual 
before it can be perfected in the mass. 

All worlds are free in the universal ether, for 



58 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY. 

each moves in its orbit of its own volition, with- 
out restraint or constraint. Man is free only 
when he has the good of every other human 
being at heart and evolves that good into the 
universal life. He is only self-poised and free in 
the good in which he is involved. Good action 
affects the universal spirit, and affects every man 
in accord with his conditions, but each may be 
affected differently by the same influx. That 
which is a great good for one may be a lesser 
good for another, and an evil to a third ; for the 
power of receiving and appropriating virtue is 
always and everywhere an individual possession. 
Every one is free to appropriate that only which 
appeals to him. 

There is no real freedom on the animal plane 
of development, only a love of it ; and this love 
does not include freedom for others, not even for 
the wife of a man's bosom. 



THE POWER OF LOVE. 59 



CHAPTER IV. 



THE POWER OF LOVE. 



Love is threefold in expression, — a A, animal, 
mental, and spiritual. 

Animal and mental love are physical in mani- 
festation. These loves are in the attraction which 
prompts birds to flock together, animals to gather 
into herds, and men to combine in society. 

The same attraction draws wealth to a center 
in syndicates, power in corporations and govern- 
ments ; and it is the factor which unites the sexes 
in pairs. 

Love is always love on every plane, however 
obscure its manifestations may be. It is a kind 
of protoplasmic cement, which causes the soul to 
adhere to anything and everything it touches in 
its onward march and blind search after the great- 
est good. It attaches man to things, to ideas, to 
wealth and the means of gaining it, to food and 
drink, and even to the habit of drunkenness. Its 
attachments are strong and weak. In some cases 



60 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY. 

the love is more for an act than for an object, as 
in the spending or gaining of a fortune rather 
than for the fortune itself. 

Men seek brothels for the love of an act, since 
they have no love for the women whom they meet 
in such places. 

Man rises and falls on the animal plane through 
the exercise of sexual love. Alone he can only 
fall, and he is alone unless woman unites with her 
whole heart in the sex union. Its effect is to 
build up or to tear down. Union is strength ; 
division, weakness here as elsewhere. 

Every individual is male and female, mind and 
soul ; and the action and reaction of these princi- 
ples causes all the motions of the body and the 
emotions of the soul. The peculiar office of the 
male is to beget ; of the female, to conceive. 
The mind begets ; the soul conceives. So mind 
is the positive projective principle of energy, or 
the male ; and the soul is the magnetic receptive 
principle, or female. The active mind projects its 
thought, its vir, to the soul, wherein that which 
is most positively and continuously thought is 
conceived, gestated, and is finally born into the 
body as atomic matter, to work its way out into 



THE POWER OF LOVE. 6 1 

acts which are good or evil. Thus is generated in 
ourselves all that we are, and all that we do is 
our thought objectified in actions, which are our 
children, whose parentage we cannot deny. 

Conjunction is the foundation of all manifesta- 
tion. We exist by and through the conjunction 
of the positive and negative forces. All acts 
spring from love, which is the Father so often 
referred to by Jesus. Vice and morality are off- 
spring of the same forces, positive and negative, 
male and female, begotten of that " Love which 
lieth at the foundation." Some offspring are be- 
gotten in love of good, others in love of evil ; 
and each bears fruit in accord with its nature and 
quality. 

Conjunction of the sexes begets other offspring 
than physical children, which are rarely begotten 
in promiscuous sex indulgence. Disgust, the 
enemy of health and happiness, is conceived, and 
the woman brings forth a loathsome progeny to 
fester in, pollute, and poison the social atmos- 
phere, and ultimate in sores, ulcers, and physical 
degeneration. 

Who can estimate the malignancy, the fatal 
power of disgust? Dissatisfaction, which is con- 



62 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY. 

tinually begotten in wedlock and out of it, soon 
culminates in disgust, which in its turn breeds 
crime and disease. It is fed by every act when 
the prompting is not mutual love. 

The learning of the schools, the gossip of the 
world, the knowledge of law, finance, political 
economy, — all, in fact, which relates to this outer 
life, are mere pastimes for this world and must 
pass away ; but the knowledge gained through 
the reactions of love takes hold on immortal 
energy and abides. This knowledge does not 
come through mental experience alone, but 
through the union of truth and mind, or the 
male and female potencies. 

When two of opposite sex come together, an 
experience is begotten which is denominated in 
the Scriptures knowledge ; "and Adam knew his 
wife Eve." 

Infinite happiness is in oneness, unity, not in 
division ; and the nearer two approach to oneness 
the higher the happiness and the greater the cre- 
ative energy evolved. 

Infinite wisdom has fixed an impassable barrier 
to the complete fusion of two into one, and at 
this limit pain begins. If absolute fusion were 



THE POWER OF LOVE. 63 

possible, all forms and objects would be united in 
one, and creation would cease. But energy has 
not divided itself wholly into male and female; 
the undivided, or unconditioned, remains to sepa- 
rate their activities, as time and space. Conditions 
divide these activities also, and the separation 
produces an interchange of spirit, of action, and 
reaction varying in rapidity of vibration corre- 
sponding to the nature of the dividing substance. 

Vibrations are both pleasurable and painful, 
those which reach the soul producing joy and sat- 
isfaction, while those which end in the body result 
in pain and unrest. 

True pleasure is of the soul, and the divine 
body is evolved from knowledge which we feel to 
be true by the peace and joy which is in and of 
it. We do not think out such knowledge ; we 
feel in it the pulsations of immortality, and in it 
there is neither fear nor shame nor guilt. 

Immortality is begotten in the conjugal love of 
souls, but on the animal plane of conjugality we 
beget only physical children and disease unwit- 
tingly. Children take advantage of us, and steal 
into our lives unbidden and often unwelcomed. 
Sometimes deformed, hideous, or idiotic guests 



64 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY. 

join us at the feast, when the invitation is 
general. 

Men and women embrace, having sensual 
pleasure only as an object, not realizing that the 
monsters of the human species are begotten of 
the extinguished fires of lust, falling like ashes 
and smoke, involving the devotees of pleasure in 
shame and ruin. 

Ah, woman, fragile and beautiful as a flower in 
bloom! Can she realize that she holds within 
her nature the balm of healing for sick bodies and 
minds, the power that can build anew the wasted 
atoms of the old and worn-out structures in which 
life is housed ? She is created to increase life, 
not to degrade and destroy it by selling herself 
for fashion, gold, display, or honors. That which 
she too often accepts in exchange for herself is 
not the love which her regal nature demands. 
Although the shows of life pass in splendor, the 
colors fade as the cheek fades, never to be 
renewed. 

She listens to another voice than that of love, 
and through a weary life she hungers for com- 
panionship, vainly trying to fill the loneliness 
with other interests, only to be devoured with 



THE POWER OF LOVE. 65 

ennui and repelled from him whom she has prom- 
ised to love and honor, with disgust. She enters 
into a world of pretense and conceives a family 
of lies, which consume life as worms devour a 
corpse. 

To create life and love is woman's mission. She 
is love's tabernacle, and without the presence of 
the god how empty are its chambers ! Dust is 
on its floors; the decorations of its walls are 
faded ; its gorgeous vases are filled only with 
withered flowers. The dim corridors echo to no 
coming feet ; the silence of the grave is in its 
inner chambers. 

The unloved, unloving woman hungers and 
thirsts for love. Men experiment with her in 
passion and wantonness, but she is unfed except 
she eat her own heart. The soul of woman is 
filled with phantoms, dreams of the perfect union 
with one ; perhaps it is a faint memory of a true 
conjunctive love known in some past and other- 
wise forgotten age, when man was more worthy, 
less a trifler than in the present time. But 
whether phantom, dream, or memory, it shadows 
forth complete manhood, the perfect counter- 
part. This is ideal conjugal love, and nothing 



66 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY. 

will satisfy woman except the man who has the 
same phantom image in himself. He is her 
counterpart ; they are twin souls. 

Few men are ever conscious of this phantom of 
love. It is buried too deeply under the desire of 
possession, and can never manifest without the 
aid of woman, who in giving herself increases the 
fire until desire is ashes and the image in man is 
revealed. Then they twain are one, and being 
interblended become one song of worship in an 
eternity of immortal life. 

The genius of love is freedom. It is not pur- 
chasable ; it gives itself. The most alluring fasci- 
nations cannot attract it ; they may attract its 
outward symbols, drawing two bodies together, 
while the souls are forever disjoined. All priestly 
rites and legal enactments are vain and void 
unless love calls souls together, and no divorce 
is possible when the true marriage is consum- 
mated. 

Most marriages are of the body and of the 
mind, and what wonder that when the novelty 
of the relation wears off the souls shrink openly 
from each other, having no part in the incestuous 
union ? Woman is a mystery, and man knows her 



THE POWER OF LOVE. 6j 

only in conjugal love. Passion does not reveal 
her, nor can she know man through passion. 
Under its sway he lies silent and unknown, with 
power only to beget the lie he is acting in the 
holy name of love. 

The spirit which descends from woman to man 
to make him an immortal being is halted at the 
door of creation by the inrushing of passion, and 
instead of being incorporated into his body as 
immortal substance, combines with passion and 
becomes a mortal being. Thus was Cain begot- 
ten and conceived, and thus violence and crime 
are ushered into being to flourish for a season 
and then vanish away. 

He who truly knows woman until his soul is 
filled with her spirit has her phantom in himself, 
and thus perfected in one, they are eternally wed ; 
they are in God and he is in them. 

Thou searcher after the deep things of life, what 
experience lingers longest in memory? What 
vanished good is most sacred and holy ? It is 
" Love's young dream," which bathed in rosy 
light life's early morning, before the fire of pas- 
sion burned fiercely, or the heart was hardened by 
the attritions of selfish desires. 



68 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY. 

That ray of divine light was the glow of 
heavenly warmth quickening into life the divine 
within, which is beyond and above " the changes 
and chances of this mortal world." 

Other experiences have stolen between then 
and now ; innocence and trust have withered with 
evil knowledge and doubt, and the light and joy 
of life are a dream, dear, well-remembered, but 
vanished forever. 

Thus does man die spiritually by losing his sen- 
sitiveness to love, and because of this loss he 
must reincarnate in the mold of this world until 
the first love of his nature permeates all his being 
and life, and he becomes wise, with innocence, sen- 
sitive, with all experience, and trustful as the little 
child whom the Great Master made the exemplar 
of fitness for the kingdom of heaven. The Rosi- 
crucian aphorism, " Love lieth at the foundation," 
is the gospel for all life and for all time. Fully 
comprehended, it includes all that makes man 
divine. It is the foundation of family, races, 
nations, governments, progress, order, peace, jus- 
tice, and purity; in fact, it gives all that truly 
enriches man. Love is the first cause of soul 
sensation when the fire of life is kindled. It is 



THE POWER OF LOVE. 69 

the inmost of soul life, the cherished and most 
sacred emotion. 

Our tenderest love is not exploited abroad. It 
is too sacred for public exhibition. We love in 
secret, as Jesus commanded his followers to wor- 
ship, and love and adoration are alike an ecstasy 
of the soul. 

There is no life without heat and consequently 
no growth, and love is the heat from which light 
evolves. Love is the inmost of mind, and to it the 
mind owes all its creative power. It is the secret 
attraction which draws truth from darkness and 
twilight into the sunlight of recognition. 

The mind barren of love is a sterile waste, 
where nothing grows to please or gratify. It is 
void of creative power. Love is a well of living 
water out of which flows peace and the bliss of 
the angels. It is rest for the weary ; it is sleep in 
which passion ceases its ravages, a soul slumber 
where nothing intrudes to disturb or distract. 

With the first vibrations of the soul of love, the 
mind falls at the feet of some ideal being in com- 
plete surrender, asking only " to lay the throbbing 
head on the beloved bosom and breathe life out 
sweetly there." This ideal being is the spiritual 



70 E VOL UTION OF IMMOR TAUT Y. 

or love body, something divine born of the truth, 
a breath of the Great God made flesh, in which is 
the spirit of love and worship. 

In the evolution of life truth is wedded to an 
idea, and this conjunction is conjugal love, the 
union of male and female, or true marriage. 

Ideas are born of love ; they lead the world ; 
they are in the van of progress and are always 
arriving ; they are the vir of thought. 

Spiritual marriage takes place in each one of us 
and brings forth the powers, faculties, and attrib- 
utes of mind, even as children are born of physical 
marriage. The first fruit of this conjunction is the 
evolution of a center of energy which is known as 
executive force. This gives the spirit of resist- 
ance, of aggression, and of self-preservation. It 
is the head center of the animal, and from its 
manifestation has come the idea of the kingship, 
or supremacy, of the firstborn. 

The next in order of formation is the domestic 
or social center, where tenderness and sympathy 
predominate and love rules the mind. Here so- 
ciety germinates and the first impulse of justice is 
given. Man cannot become a moral being alone ; 
he must be associated with others in order to 



THE POWER OF LOVE, J I 

know the right from the wrong; he must meet 
pain in order to feel pity. His sense of justice is 
born from resistance to aggression and wrongs 
inflicted by brute, unfeeling force. 

Love and truth are one ! infinite, unlimited free- 
dom, but being divided in the soul, love is hungry 
for truth or in love with it ; and searching for what 
it desires, the soul sends out from itself only force, 
as a telegram goes in the form of questions. 

In order to receive an answer to its quest the 
soul opens a receiver in the mind, a cell or womb, 
into which the answer comes as thought which 
germinates into ideas. This empty reservoir, 
which opens as a flower into which the universe 
may deposit itself, may be called the ideal center, 
the center which evolves ideas. We are fed with 
truth from this center which makes us wiser and 
better. Here is where telegrams from the Infinite 
meet the listening ear, and intellect and percep- 
tion are born of the light it radiates. 

This ideal center is the point where the animal 
instinct culminates and reason begins, for ideality, 
or imagination, is creative and it is the beginning 
of immortality. 

It is generally believed that man is what he is 



72 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY. 

forced by environment and heredity to become, 
which is partly true, but not unavoidably and 
altogether so. There is an alchemy of soul which 
transmutes these elements into atoms of flesh, 
bone, nerve, thought, and spirit peculiar to each 
person, at the same time rejecting the undesirable 
material. Thus the soul has a choice of elements, 
and this power of choice is in its loves. 

The universe of matter, spirit, and circum- 
stances which infringe on man as if to overwhelm 
and destroy him simply enfold and feed the 
physical, the spirit of them entering into the soul 
by the way of the mind to be transmuted into 
that which man loves best. The true man towers 
above the conditions which surround and would 
enthrall him, and that which destroys the false 
becomes power to overcome in the true. Each 
element has its place in the economy of being, and, 
rightly used, works out the salvation of the soul. 

This ideal center is the soul's mirror in which 
the unknown good is reflected, and thus reflected 
illuminates and changes the entire nature. Man 
rises thus above nature, which he desires to 
improve. 

Originality in art, science, religion, and litera- 



THE POWER OF LOVE. 73 

ture issues from this center, which also is in- 
fringed upon by the lower world of falsehood, 
deception, and vain imaginings which give birth 
to superstition and obsession. 

It is dawning on the world that disease, appar- 
ently incurable, can be healed by mental treat- 
ment. Diseased tissue can be reorganized, re- 
created into health, by focusing thought and desire 
on the patient to that end. But in this, as in all 
successful mental operations, the desire must pre- 
cede, or at least must unite with the mental act. 

Too much stress is laid on diet and other exter- 
nal means for perfecting the body and keeping 
physical functions in healthful activity. It should 
be known and recognized that the mental and love 
natures are as important factors in the nourish- 
ment of the body and the building of its atoms as 
the food we eat. 

If life is desirable at all, it is just as much so 
here as in any other state, or world. 

There is no question about the ability of man to 
change things outside of himself, or to create 
them, as the telegraph, machinery, etc. ; but that 
he can alter vitally and effectually himself has 
heretofore been considered an impossibility. It 



74 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY. 

has been held that any change within himself for 
the better is a gift from God, or some power other 
than himself; but it is slowly dawning on the 
world that, as he can change or remake the atoms 
of his body, he can as well change, regulate, 
and control his inner man ; that, in fact, salvation 
is of the whole being, animal, mental, spiritual, and 
that on all planes man is the architect of his own 
fortunes. 

In love the animal nature sleeps and man lives 
an ideal life, the Christ-life, wherein the soul 
respires as the lungs do, in breathing new life 
and being from infinite energy, which is love. In 
this ideal life, love builds new atoms of spiritual 
force, which change magically the sluggish phys- 
ical into the fire body, which is divine. 

Thus shall ''this mortal put on immortality"; 
the idea is the seed of it. To conceive of a thing 
is proof of its existence in some form or condition, 
here or elsewhere. The universe is infinite, and 
it would fail of being so if man's thought could 
transcend it. 

Paul in the ecstasy of inspiration declared that 
" this mortal shall put on immortality," " in a 
moment, in the twinkling of an eye," but he seems 



THE POWER OF LOVE. 75 

to have conceived it as taking place on some 
resurrection, or general judgment day, as if the 
soul's experiences are marked by sections of time. 
Perhaps we misunderstand Paul, or possibly 
he did not fully understand the Christ idea, 
that there need be no such change as we call 
death. 

The story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, 
fable though it may be, shows that the idea of 
man's ability to put on immortality in a moment is 
not new. It is a well-established fact that the 
astral body can be detached from the physical and 
appear at any distance to those still in the phys- 
ical body; but the soul, or fire body, is quite a dif- 
ferent structure, in substance and vibration. It 
gestates in the soul, being begotten of truth and 
nurtured in wisdom. It connects with every atom 
of the body and with every faculty of the mind, 
to control, to project, to indraw, to change, to 
divide, to cause to appear and to disappear at will. 
These are some of the powers of an immortal 
being. Possibly Paul meant that some should 
conquer death when he said, "We shall not all 
sleep." 

The idea of a day of universal resurrection and 



J 6 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY. 

judgment is out of harmony with infinite wisdom 
and justice. To the soul there are no days or 
years, but one eternal now, and God is all the 
time within us in judgment. 

When a man's sins overtake him is the day of 
judgment for him ; when his misdeeds come 
thronging back into his consciousness, demanding 
recognition and reward, the God within judges, 
separates, and punishes, and the soul is the great 
white throne of deity. 

When a man forsakes his evil ways and turns 
his back on wrong-doing, his sins turn also and 
follow him. They are his, the angularities of 
his nature, the atoms of which he is made. 
Let him receive them as a father his wayward 
children. 

Their home is the love of evil that gave them 
being, and there they have a right to return to die, 
to be indrawn and forgotten, or forgiven, being 
received in love and recognized by wisdom, their 
work having been accomplished according to the 
law of their existence. 

This is the at-one-ment, the indrawing of evil to 
its source. Jesus said, " Resist not evil." If the 
evil instinct be indrawn and transmuted into good, 



THE POWER OF LOVE. J J 

no outward evil can harm us. Love is the uni- 
versal absorbent in whose infinite bosom evil dis- 
appears. 

The consequences of our evil actions come home 
to the source of the actions ; their death throes 
are painful, but all regrets cease and tears are 
wiped away when we succeed in forgiving our- 
selves. 

There can be no salvation of the race until each 
individual of it is cemented to all by brotherly 
love. There can be no salvation of the individual 
so long as the different faculties of the mind are 
at war with each other. Salvation is in har- 
monious union, or perfect moral and physical 
health. 

Salvation cannot be perfected in a diseased 
body, and it is to teach this truth that Jesus healed 
the sick. His religion is physical and spiritual, 
but the first work is with the body. Disease and 
pain make the mind opaque ; the light cannot 
shine through it. Pain is only the froth and foam 
of being, in too great agitation. It is the result of 
the jar and friction of opposing elements of mind 
and body. If the atoms of the body be true one 
to another, and the elements of mind are in 



78 E VOL UTION OF IMMOR TALI T Y. 

harmony, all is peace in the outer and inner man. 
Truth, peace, and joy descend into the minutest 
atom of being, as the body is built or rebuilt by 
the quality of our thought. 



THE FORCE OF TRUTH. 



79 



CHAPTER V. 



THE FORCE OF TRUTH. 



" What is truth ? " was the pertinent question 
of Pilate when Jesus said, " Every one that is of 
the truth heareth my voice." 

Truth is the inmost reality, or substance, of 
thought, the stable element in all things. It is a 
fixed principle, and forms of thought or conduct 
are permanent or otherwise in accordance with 
the proportion of truth embodied in them. There 
is a modicum of truth in all forms, else they 
could not exist. Unadulterated error is negative, 
nothing. 

Love is spirit. Like the wind, it bloweth where 
it listeth and attaches itself where it will. Love is 
feminine, magnetic, and in union with the positive 
force of truth brings forth immortality. 

The law of creation is the same in all, begetting 
and conceiving ; positive and negative forces in 
action and reaction. Love, in itself, is not light, 



8o EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY. 

but the union with truth begets light, the rays of 
which are thought. 

The mind of man perceives truth vaguely, 
gropes after it, and asks with Pilate what it is, 
feeling within himself hints of its stable quality 
and its glorious splendor. It is well that he per- 
ceives it only in fractions ; its full body would 
blast him with excess of light. 

We are, in truth, what we think and what we 
love. These are our realities, the one masculine 
and the other feminine, the male and female in 
each one of us, whose union or conjunction de- 
velops the germ of immortality. This process is 
aided and fostered by the physical sex union, where 
the love of two souls coalesces in the union of two 
bodies. 

Good, true, healthful thought develops into good 
action, and, working outward through the body, 
builds healthy vital atoms for its construction and 
renewal. But it is only in part that truth can 
manifest in thought. We are environed by a 
world of images which mirror forth with more or 
less accuracy some reality ; the mind perceives 
the image, but can only surmise what is the truth 
concealed in it. 



THE FORCE OF TRUTH. 8 1 

Man thinks, and the thought takes form in in- 
ventions outside of his body, which are at best 
clumsy images of the reality he endeavored to 
embody or portray, and the image is never di- 
vorced from this inner reality, which is the truth 
of it. That this weak image of immortality, and 
its way of attainment, can be set forth in words is 
proof of its reality in the inner world of the ego. 
There is no absolute falsehood ; every lie has 
something true in it or it could not be ex- 
pressed, truth and its negative falsehood being 
intimately blended, although always at war. The 
absolute unconditioned truth cannot be expressed. 
We behold its radiant shadow, or image, in the 
beauty, grandeur, and sublimity of nature, in the 
perfection of form, and in everything which is or 
can be of use in the physical, mental, or moral 
world. 

But if we worship simply the image and do not 
perceive its inner significance, stability, or reality, 
the soul soon falls back on itself empty and hun- 
gry, for the soul can never be filled or satisfied 
with fleeting shadows. 

All men have an instinctive love of truth ; even 
the lowest scoundrel has a subtle undercurrent of 



82 E VOL UTION OF I MM OR TALIT Y. 

respect for it, which gets expression in his best 
moments, toward another scoundrel who is a 
chosen pal. 

" Perfect love casteth out fear," the distinguish- 
ing mark of the slave, and in it he stands a free 
man ; but truth makes him steadfast, firm, in the 
new-found freedom of love. Man's love is under 
the dominion of his will and reason if he honestly 
and diligently seeks for its right use, for in the 
final analysis use determines the quality and value 
of any possession. 

Idle, useless action is demoralizing and destruc- 
tive, not only to those who indulge in it, but to 
the whole interdependent structure of society. 
The perfect system and order of the heavenly 
bodies, each in its appointed orbit, true to its time 
and place, moving, not entirely each for its own 
well-being, but for the harmonious adjustment of 
the whole starry system, have no idle, irrelevant, 
useless motions to destroy the universal harmony. 

The universe is a mighty orchestra, evolving 
grand melodies with infinite variations. Its intri- 
cate mechanism suggests wheels within wheels, 
moving in perfect order and harmony in the 
development of that grand diapason whose theme 
is use. 



THE FORCE OF TRUTH. 83 

In the material world all is order, system, and 
harmonious action, but an ascent into the world 
of mind reveals another condition. Love ceases 
to be wholly an attraction of matter, and educa- 
tion, taste, choice enter into its affinities. Pas- 
sion is no longer under the brute law of condition, 
times, or the demands of the female, but is free to 
express itself at any time, unless under the law of 
the higher nature of reason and right. 

Thus man gets out of time and becomes a dis- 
cordant note in nature's anthem, and who shall 
correct the false note and set the singer in his 
true place ? Only himself can do this, when he 
shall pause, correct his errors, watch for the true 
beat, and begin again his orderly march in the 
evolution of life. 

To love God, according to Jesus, is the first 
and greatest commandment, and God is that spirit 
in man which creates. It is his love nature, and 
he should strive to perfect it in the stable element 
of truth, by thinking, speaking, and living the 
kruth in all ways and to the uttermost. 

" God is Love," that is, the creative or forma- 
tive power of the universe. But the God that is 
Love is not that great Infinite Energy in which 
and of which are all things created. 



84 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY, 

In the story of Genesis this Love God was out- 
witted by the serpent who pointed man to a 
higher condition than that of the slavish obedi- 
ence of ignorance. The finite character of that 
God is further shown in the declaration that he 
" repented that he had made man," and through- 
out the Old Testament we find him engaged in 
more or less successful struggles with the stiff- 
necked and rebellious Jews. 

Jesus says, " God is a spirit, and those who 
worship him must worship him in spirit and in 
truth." The " spirit and the truth " you are 
enjoined to worship in are your own love and 
the reality of your own soul. The spirit of God 
entering in impregnates the soul, and this is wor- 
ship in its fullest sense. To know truth one must 
worship it, not with song or words or ceremo- 
nies, however charming or esthetically satisfying, 
but in the secret recesses of being, when " thou 
hast entered into thy closet and shut to the door, 
that nothing may distract or disturb the calm of 
spirit." 

In that silence and utter calm the search for 
truth and its worship are to be prosecuted. From 
the soul, the center of being, a spark may shine 



THE FORCE OF TRUTH. 85 

out illuminating the darkness within, and giving 
evidence of the birth of the soul into immortality. 
But if all is dark when the boisterous outer nature 
is calmed, the force of will, love, and desire, the 
mind, the energy of the entire being, should be 
focused, drawn to a central point in the solar 
plexus (the great ganglia of nerves back of and a 
little above the pit of the stomach), which is the 
central station of the soul. Be patient, earnest, 
longing for the light, and fix thought and imagin- 
ation on this center where love and truth unite, 
and it may be that a flicker of flame, a gentle 
warmth may give evidence that the fire is lighted 
which will consume all error and weakness. 
Love and truth unite to bring forth the priceless 
offspring of immortality. 

The vibrations of spirit give pleasure, but to 
insure that result, spirit must be organized into a 
form. Too rapid vibrations disintegrate forms, as 
coal or wood is disintegrated by fire. The more com- 
plete and perfect the love spirit, the more rapid the 
vibrations ; and if in a form the attractions of whose 
atoms is powerful enough to hold it together, the 
greater the pleasure derived from the vibrations. 

Truth, or reality, is the stable center, even 



86 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY. 

of the pleasures derived from the vibrations of 
love, which constructs forms by the cooperation 
of truth, and destroys that which it builds by 
excess of itself. 

Truth fixes the granite mountains in their im- 
movable bases, but it is love which howls around 
them in storm and rain, or smiles on them in the 
sunshine, dissolving and disintegrating them into 
soil and mists and vapors. With slower vibra- 
tions these again solidify to preserve the moun- 
tain form, strength, and beauty. 

So truth and love are one, in union, producing 
that fire body which is immortal and which they 
who are truly wedded shall become. What is 
this which evolves slowly, laboriously, from min- 
eral to vegetable, from vegetable to animal, from 
animal to man, who, looking up at the sun and 
the stars, questions the existence of God, while 
the same mystery is consciously within himself? 

We have many names for this force which we 
cannot wholly explain, this something which 
breathes, digests food, walks, moves, uses our 
bodies, sleeps when we are weary, wakens in 
the morning, grows flesh and bones, and heals 
the wounds of the bodies we abuse. It is a tire- 



THE FORCE OF TRUTH. 8 J 

less energy, not limited by objects nor their laws 
of being ; centered in man it is Soul. Science 
has sought to capture and define it, laboring with 
microscope and telescope, with scalpel and cruci- 
ble, but in vain, for even protoplasm refuses to 
yield up the secret, to that which denies the ex- 
istence of it in the very self which seeks to dis- 
cover it elsewhere. 

Scientific research has established the fact that 
the cell is the beginning of forms, which, however 
complex they may become, are built to complete- 
ness by an aggregation of cells. 

The belief that the first cell of any series is 
masculine is very ancient, and probably arises from 
the fact that the fire of being resides in the male. 
From this fact doubtless comes the Buddhistic 
conception that the energy of creation is a semi- 
nal rain which continually descends from the 
Brahma Lokas (God-worlds), and it is probably 
from the same fact that all religions have a male 
deity at the head of the pantheon, whether it be 
filled with a multitude of gods or is tenanted 
nominally by only one. 

The leadership of the race is vested in Adam 
from the same cause, and herein is also to be found 



88 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY. 

the reason why the whole race is collectively called 

man. 

This question of cell growth, its activities and 
its meaning as related to man and woman, is 
embodied in an address before a Federation of 
Women's Clubs, held in Michigan in 1895. The 
address is here reproduced by consent of the 
author. It is entitled : — 

HIGHER THOUGHT OF SEX. 

Science halts in its last analysis of matter, 
baffled by a principle which eludes investigation, 
presenting everywhere its sphinx-like presence, 
the principle of life. We cannot delve deeply 
enough into matter to reach, much less define 
that principle, but we can follow scientific research 
far enough to learn that its first intelligent ac- 
tivities are sexual in character. Everything in 
nature is male and female, and the creative prin- 
ciples are the principles of generation. The 
negative female principle gathers together and 
concentrates ; the positive male principle scatters, 
casts abroad. Through this positive and negative 
action currents of electricity pass from pole to 
pole to bind, enfold, maintain all things in their 



THE FORCE OF TRUTH. 89 

appointed places. All forms are generated 
through this positive and negative interchange, 
and these are the principles of sex. 

Growth, evolution, are the fruit of sex activities, 
and the progressive changes take place through 
the feminine principle, or form. In the lowest 
animal and plant life the best nourished cells 
develop females, the smaller, underfed ones males. 
Female-ness is quiescent satisfaction ; male-ness is 
hungry activity. Protozoa are single protoplas- 
mic cells with a nucleus or center of reproductive 
matter. They are microscopic infusoria and their 
universe is a tiny drop of water. Yet they live, 
love, and propagate their kind after the universal 
law of sex, and in one regard they may seem to 
have an advantage over more highly organized 
creatures ; they are potentially immortal. In 
" Evolution of Sex," by Geddes and Thomson, oc- 
curs the following statement: ''Protozoa not too 
highly differentiated, living in conditions where 
conjugation is possible, have a freedom from 
natural death." Alfred Binet says : " In ciliate 
infusorians, conjugation, which means an exchange 
of nuclear elements, is the necessary condition of 
eternal youth and immortality." 



9<D EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY. 

These nuclear elements are the reproductive 
cells ; these creatures multiply by fission, or cell 
division, but they live through conjugation, the 
sex union in which their elements mingle and 
again reform, without which union the divided 
cells soon waste away and die. The simple 
elements of their being are mingled, fused ; 
nothing is withheld, and the result is " eternal 
youth and immortality." That fact is worth mak- 
ing a note of; in it is contained a hint on which 
humanity may well ponder. Here love is born, 
in this lowest phase of life, in the form of satis- 
faction of protoplasmic hunger, and thus at the 
very bottom of the ladder of sentient existence we 
get the lesson that love is stronger than death. 

A grade higher true sexual attraction is devel- 
oped with free promiscuous association, and from 
this point selective sexuality arises, the swarming 
hordes of insect life associating in pairs after a brief 
courtship. Farther on among the birds and mam- 
mals true psychic love is evolved. Cooperation 
exists, partnerships are formed, and the tenderest 
affection prevails far beyond the breeding period. 
They have their standard of morality and of man- 
ners ; they admire, love, and hate ; they are 



THE FORCE OF TRUTH. 



91 



jealous, frank, suspicious, or confident. The vague 
attraction of the nuclear cell has become a settled 
reproductive impulse, out of which blossom all 
the amenities of animal life. 

The same general evolvement takes place in the 
vegetable world from the lowest to the highest 
organism, the business of nature being the creation 
of new forms of life through the sex activities, and 
these creative activities are everywhere the out- 
come of the vivifying principle of love. Erasmus 
Darwin's "Loves of the Flowers" furnishes some 
charming pictures of the variety and beauty of 
reproductive plant life, and the author affirms that 
11 the whole of nature is a hymn of love." 

This is the genesis of sex. As the psychic 
or emotional nature is evolved sex attraction 
expands into all the phases of the domestic affec- 
tions. The tiger and his mate are a unit against 
the world in the protection of their offspring ; the 
higher apes pay their mates and offspring the ten- 
derest attention ; even the blind mole grieves 
itself to death over its dead companion. In their 
native state harmony reigns in the domestic life 
of animals, for they are obedient to the laws of 
their being. Among them, from the lowest to the 



9 2 



EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY, 



highest, the female is free. She calls the male or 
dismisses him at her pleasure. This is an invari- 
able law of undomesticated animal life, but when 
we come to the human animal plane we find a total 
lapse from nature's methods, a complete reversal 
of her order, with a consequent degradation of the 
sex functions. This may well be one of those 
things that the angels desire to look into. If the 
supreme architect of the universe, before whose 
wisdom every head must bow, selected the sex 
principles as the foundation of His stupendous 
structure of life, what part do we play who have 
reversed their progressive order and thrust them 
down among the shameful indecencies of thought ? 
When the psychic and spiritual natures are capable 
of the highest development we should expect to 
find the most reverent treatment of the subject, 
together with the greatest wisdom and knowledge 
concerning its manifold activities, powers, and uses. 
For sex is of the soul and of the spirit as well as 
of the body, for the God from whom we derive our 
spiritual being is our father and our mother. In 
this higher range of being, we might hope for the 
flower of a free and glorious womanhood and 
a noble, self-poised, aspiring manhood, the per- 



THE FORCE OF TRUTH. 



93 



feet chord and rhythm of life, beings truly only a 
little lower than the angels. But alas for human 
progress ! The legal enactments of our higher 
civilization do not hesitate to degrade the physical 
sex functions below the level of the brutes, by 
making refusal to cohabit by either party in mar- 
riage a ground for divorce. Why does this fright- 
ful degradation exist, this lapse from love to the 
monstrous perversions of lust? Because the 
womanhood of the world is not free, and because 
we are not free, — we think the thought of slaves. 
Our ideals are perverted ; instead of taking coun- 
sel of the higher nature, we are cheated of our 
birthright by the maxims of policy and tremble 
before the rod of the world's censure, when it rests 
with us to remodel society and to elevate life to 
the plane of the divine order and harmony. 

Nothing can exist in external form which is not 
first thought. No condition is possible but has 
its genesis in the world of idea. Thought shapes 
the world ; it is what we think it to be ; we put 
into it such quality as we will by the quality of 
our thought. 

A magnificent elm stands in a meadow, sound, 
sturdy, full of sap, with the life of a century in 



94 



EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY. 



its veins. A poet dreams in its shadow. He 
hears all the winds that blow sing in its leafy 
branches; the carol of the happy birds that 
reared their young in its shelter before he was 
born ; the chatter of active squirrels fills a pause ; 
and the echo of the laughter of boys who swarmed 
up its trunk a century ago. He rejoices in its 
glowing, palpitating life experiences, its green 
head towering heavenward, ringed round with 
sunshine and the light of all the stars. " These 
and much more than these the poet sees," and so 
some new interpreter of nature, some Keats or 
Wordsworth, may make the elm immortal by re- 
vealings of its complex life. But the owner of 
the soil where it is rooted regards it with other 
eyes. He measures it critically. It is so many 
feet of lumber, worth so much per foot. That is 
all there is of the tree. He will use it in building 
a saloon on the corner of the village street. It is 
the same tree, but each makes of it according to 
his quality, and the thought of the one lifts us to 
the stars, while the other thought casts us down 
to hell. As whatever we think tends to become 
externalized, so the poem in the heart of the poet 
will get itself written, and the saloon in the heart 



THE FORCE OF TRUTH. 95 

of the churl will get itself built, and out of one 
will be the issues of life and out of the other the 
issues of death. 

We are what we think. The eternal verities 
take no note of our affectations and hypocrisies 
of speech and manner. We may prate of the 
freedom and dignity of the " new woman," but as 
long as we are simple echoes of conventional 
popular opinions on the subject before us we have 
neither freedom nor dignity. 

Liberty is first of the soul. She only is the 
free woman who has thought herself out into the 
light of absolute truth and can dispassionately 
consider and accept the positive right. A bold 
heart is required for free thought, and the courage 
and enthusiasm that inspire the martyr will alone 
induce us to accept the consequence of such 
thinking, when it is applied to the relation of the 
sexes. By it 

The balance beam of fate is bent, 
The bounds of good and ill are rent. 

The collective thought of communities forms 
conditions, and it is this collective thought of sex 
which makes it almost questionable for a woman 



g6 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY. 

to speak to women on matters pertaining to it, 
while free discussion before the two sexes which 
make the one whole is impossible, except, possi- 
bly, in some scientific gathering. But even the 
scientist handles it with reserve. Its physiology 
is fenced off as if it belonged to a department of 
nature separate and distinct from the whole being, 
and scientific prudery puts a premium on igno- 
rance. 

If there is anything impure in sex activities it 
is in the mind of the thinker. We may make 
legitimate war on improper habits and perverted 
instincts, but the functions of nature are of God's 
planning, and the wise will seek to understand 
and use them according to His idea. 

While we drift hither and thither on the bosom 
of the world's hoary conventions, marriage is be- 
coming a problem that humanity is afraid of try- 
ing to solve. Its ideals are almost wholly material, 
and men and women are bought and sold in the 
world's matrimonial market, and always to the in- 
creased degradation of unprotected womanhood, 
for where legitimate marriage is a matter of bar- 
gain and sale, illegitimate passion will reward itself 
with some defenseless prey. 



THE FORCE OF TRUTH. 9 J 

Childless marriage is fast becoming the ideal 
with both sexes, the prostitution of sex to the 
indulgence of physical appetite and passion. Vi- 
brate this thought with sufficient force and activ- 
ity and we get a generation of women physically 
diseased before puberty, and if not incapable of 
motherhood the function is exercised through such 
suffering and danger as must react most unfavor- 
ably on offspring. What is the meaning of the 
frightful increase in child immorality but this pros- 
titution of sex? Low, licentious, selfish thought 
(for such thought is not cast out by the form of 
words which make the legal union), in the con- 
ception, during gestation, and throughout the 
plastic period of infancy and early childhood, 
brings forth its deadly fruit. The child breathes 
the very air of lewdness. An undisciplined father, 
an outraged mother ; no animal save man, the 
crown of creation, will seek to cohabit with a 
pregnant female, and no female animal but woman 
invites her male companion during the period of 
gestation. Nature protects the new life, but we 
outrage nature and must suffer from her reprisals. 
The animal expression of union which is all there 
is of love in too many marriages ; the angry re- 



98 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY. 

volt against motherhood ; the shams, conceal- 
ments, and mysteries which mark the higher order 
of homes — all these vibrations wake correspond- 
ing vibrations in the sex centers of the child, 
and the side of the nature which should slumber 
throughout a tranquil youth is roused to a prema- 
ture and disastrous activity. 

What does the increasing prevalence of uterine 
disease in the last half-century mean ? It means 
that we are dragging the angel we have almost 
become back into the slime from which we have 
evolved — the protozoan quiescent satisfaction on 
the animal plane ; while the other half of human- 
ity furls his wings and reverts to the primal state 
of hungry male activity ! 

The reactions of abnormal sexuality are even 
more disastrous on man than they are on woman, 
because they vibrate almost wholly on the plane 
of the soul. There is a subtle subjective side to 
the sex relation where the silent, unseen, occult 
forces operate, and right here may be found the 
key to the spiritual inertness of men. To this 
sexual retrogression may also be ascribed the self- 
ishness and materiality of the age, the decay of 
brotherly love, and the prevalent doubt of immor- 



THE FORCE OF TRUTH. 



99 



tality and of God. Leave the surface, look into 
the heart of life, the secret councils in which the 
truth reveals itself, and we shall find that it is a 
prostituted womanhood which makes a debased 
manhood. This is the plague spot on life, the 
prolific mother of many sorrows, and the idlest 
question which can be mooted is which sex is 
most blamable. We live and die together, and 
whether we will or not we are bound to the same 
destiny. 

We have clubs, societies, associations in the 
interest of every subject under the sun but the 
vital one we are considering. We are familiar 
with the ethics of ancient religions, but the ethics 
of the most ancient of all relations is an unknown 
quantity. We know the rationale of crumbling 
civilizations, but the causes of social decay in 
modern life get only a superficial examination. 

We have dominated the subtle physical ele- 
ments of our planet by careful amd protracted 
study and effort, but who has investigated the 
tremendous forces concealed in the mystery of 
sex? Fence round the purity of woman and the 
sanctity of home with all the protective legal 
enactments that are possible ; there cannot be too 

L.oFC. 



IOO EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY. 

many, nor can they be too sweeping and radical, 
still we only compel an outward respect for the 
forms of morality. Until the deadly inertia of 
ignorance is overcome and hypocrisy and animal- 
ity are destroyed in the secret recesses of hearts 
and homes, this downward rushing current cannot 
be arrested, its forces reversed and the uplifting 
of humanity be accomplished. 

The change to higher conditions must come 
through the female. God will not reverse his 
order of progress. The heart of womanhood is 
astir and the bosom of society is heaving with its 
unrest. The present industrial competition be- 
tween the sexes has its uses or it could not be. 
It marks the era when the old dogma of the sub- 
jection of woman crumbled to pieces from sheer 
senility. As a formula, it is no more ; as a fact, it 
still dominates the interior life of woman in the 
most vital of all relations. Through industrial 
and intellectual competition we are striving for 
room for a larger expression of the " eternally 
feminine," blindly striving, many of us ; but let us 
not mistake the means for the end. Not room 
for more of the masculine quality, but room 
among men for women is the goal for effort. 



THE FORCE OF TRUTH. IOI 

Strife, competition, force, are foreign to feminine 
activities. The exceptional woman can outtop 
man in many of the strictly masculine activities, 
but in so doing she loses hold of the finer femi- 
nine element of attraction. Similars repel, is an 
axiom of physics. Marriage is the law of growth 
on every plane of being, — body, soul, spirit; but 
marriage is the fusing and interblending of oppo- 
site forces. In each of us are elements of both 
sexes, and by abnormal development of latent 
masculinity it is possible for a woman to unsex 
herself. Man is the superior animal, woman the 
superior soul. Man is force, woman is power. 
Force is generated on the material plane, the 
domain of the intellectual and animal faculties ; 
power in the emotional soul nature. If we mis- 
take the source of our strength and our light goes 
out in darkness, how great will be that darkness ! 
We cannot force man to higher levels by rang- 
ing ourselves alongside of him in his world if by 
so doing we must forsake our own. Coeducation 
by all means ; cooperation whenever it is prac- 
ticable, while we bear in mind that woman is not 
born to rival man, she is born to rule him through 
the higher affections, when she has achieved 



102 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY. 

her ultimate destiny. If woman will climb the 
heights man will follow, obedient to the force 
which holds the atoms of the universe together, — 
the attractive power of sex ; and the name of that 
attraction is love. He will follow, but he will 
never take the initial step. The line of progress 
is through the female. To think nobly, to aspire 
to higher activities, to reveal the spiritual, to oc- 
cupy the territory of the finer moralities, to be a 
pervasive power rather than a dominating force 
— this is true womanhood, the highest ideal of 
both sexes. 

The legend of creation contained in the Jewish 
Scripture is worthy of more than a cursory in- 
spection by the searcher after truth. Like all 
legends or allegories, it requires interpretation ac- 
cording to known laws of language and of nature. 
When God said, " Let us make man," the inference 
points clearly to a plurality of gods, or intelli- 
gences, in conference prior to the creation of man. 

This indicates the worship of a plurality of 
gods, which worship antedated the Jewish race, 
and was certainly not in conformity to the He- 
brew ideal of one God. No matter whence its 



THE FORCE OF TRUTH. 



IO3 



origin, in a sense the story is true. It nowhere 
affirms that creation began with the evolution of 
this globe which we call the world, but to the 
denizens of this globe it was the "beginning." 
The principle of division, the making of many 
from one, came into play, and He divided the 
above from the below, the sea from the land, light 
from darkness, day from night, making, as in the 
division of cells, the one life which was every- 
where the same, become two forms of life. 

These forms are distinct opposites and remain 
so, from " the beginning," when matter divided, to 
the subtler divisions in mind which followed as 
mind evolved. Thus ignorance is divided from 
knowledge, good from evil, death from life, and 
this further division is effected by the ego, the 
self of man, which stands between as the sepa- 
rating or pivotal power. 

The ego judges between good and evil, but is 
neither the one nor the other ; it knows light and 
darkness, but belongs to neither. 

In Isaiah God said, " Lo, I am God, and beside 
me there is none else. I make the light and I 
make the darkness ; I create good and I create 
evil ; I, the Lord, do all these things." 



104 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY. 

What God does for the universe, that /, the 
Ego, the essential self, does in its cosmos. It 
is the sole judge of what is for itself good or evil, 
and thus divides the one from the other by judg- 
ing both. 

God divided the waters by the firmament, and 
in man this firmament is the ego, the dividing- 
principle, which separates the above from the be- 
low, the light-spirit from the dark-spirit, the evil 
from the good. It is the kingdom of heaven 
which is " within you." 

Peace and joy are not in the overarching skies, 
nor in some far-away heaven, nor in some future 
time. It is within you, here, now, if the true 
self stands poised, holding the equal balance be- 
tween all opposing forces. 

Man is the image of God, containing in himself 
close hidden microscopical counterparts of all that 
God is, or that is contained in Him. He placed 
the sun in the heavens to rule the day and in man 
a miniature sun of intelligence to rule his active, 
waking, intellectual life. Because light is within 
himself man can see, for without intelligence 
nothing can be perceived. 

Man is the apex of creation, and in the apex of 



THE FORCE OF TRUTH. 105 

his humanity is concealed the first cell of another 
ascending series of evolution toward another 
higher and better nature, a nature of his own cre- 
ation and subsequent discovery. 

What was that " deep sleep " of Adam in which 
he divided and became woman and man, a deep 
sleep in which he was unconscious of the won- 
derful development taking place within himself? 
Sleep is called the twin brother of death, but the 
" deep sleep " of Adam was of another character, 
— trance, the sleep of Sialam, in which the soul 
overcomes or passes by the boundaries of both 
sleep and death. The soul has power to render 
the body torpid and incorruptible while free from 
it, when it mingles with the universal and infinite 
in space. The exercise of the same power ena- 
bles it to return and again inhabit the body, it 
may be after many days. 

The soul can and often does leave the body in 
normal sleep, at times falling into a realm where 
the laws which govern the waking consciousness 
do not exist. The impossible has no existence 
there, and the astonishing miracles of that realm 
are not wholly illusory, for they sometimes be- 
come the moving impulse to good or evil. 



106 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY. 

Sleep is a state of joy, and the soul gathers 
from it vast stores of strength and energy, which 
it infuses into the body, thus enabling it to per- 
form worthily the work which is its proper share 
in the mystery of life. In the sleep of Sialam 
Adam gave birth to the spiritual part of himself, 
which, on awaking, he found to his surprise and 
joy materialized at his side as Eve, woman, his 
wife. It would be well for us too if there could 
fall on us that " deep sleep" in which we could 
find and bring back from that realm of spirit the 
one wholly our own and fully adapted to our spir- 
itual needs. 

This story of the Ci deep sleep " and its conse- 
quences in the division of Adam is full of sug- 
gestion to the thoughtful mind. In this dual 
relation lies concealed the secret of another na- 
ture, a germ of that higher humanity which we 
may create, each pair for themselves. 

The command not to eat of certain things sug- 
gests that the appetites must come under the 
domination of the instructed and intelligent will. 
In the exercise of resistance to temptation man 
becomes master of himself. It is evident that 
man is not free to abuse himself, to do evil to 
himself, which creates disease and death. 



THE FORCE OF TRUTH. 107 

The concept of the infinite nature of deity is 
not in this story, but rather the reverse. We find 
division and antagonism steadily growing in prom- 
inence until at last God meets with an antagonist 
in one of his own creations. The advent of the 
serpent breaks the silence and peace of Eden. 
The ignorant innocence of Adam and Eve, their 
trustful obedience, gives place to tumult, distrust, 
and deceit, and the far-off sullen roar of the bat- 
tle of the ages comes to the ears of the God who 
" repented that he had made man." From this 
time God and man are at variance, because the 
truth being presented to Adam by the serpent, the 
plan of creation is thwarted. How unlike the 
God of Isaiah, who proclaims, " Lo, I am God ! I 
change not." 

Evidently this repentant, changeful, warlike 
God is not the God whom Jesus reveals as the 
Father, nor does he anywhere allude to the Edenic 
story, or the fall of man. It is Paul, the lawyer, 
who makes the latter a cardinal principle in the 
new religion of Christianity. 



I08 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY. 



CHAPTER VI. 

THE WISDOM OF THE SERPENT. 

The serpent is a very ancient symbol of wisdom 
and was once an object of worship. Hargrave 
Jennings says, in " The Rosicrucians " : — 

" Here we have the object of adoration of the 
Ophites, the female generative power, the de- 
stroying and regenerating power among the 
Ophites, and indeed the Gnostics generally. The 
serpent was called the Megalistor, or Great Builder 
of the Universe (Maia, the Buddhistic Illu- 
sion)." Even Jesus bears testimony to the wis- 
dom of serpents. " Be ye therefore wise as ser- 
pents." 

The ancient symbol of a serpent with his tail in 
his mouth was derived from the appearance of 
the foetus in the womb at the end of the first 
month. (See Plate II.) Given a starting point, 
and force propelling an object into space, the ob- 
ject will describe a circle and return to the start- 
ing point. 



THE WISDOM OF THE SERPENT. 

Line in nature is not found, 
Unit and universe are round, 



109 



says Emerson. 

The serpent in physical form is the only ani- 
mate being that conforms to the second principle 
in creation, namely, the boundary line, — circum- 
ference, — the moving force of objects, — the cir- 
cumstances which compel the struggle for exist- 
ence. The serpent may be said to be the force in 
the universe and within us that disintegrates, dis- 
solves, throws off matter from the center to the 
circumference. By his power the solid rock is 
dissolved, changed into soil and afterwards dissi- 
pated as intangible spirit. Through him all forms 
change, die, pass away and disappear from mun- 
dane experience. 

A revolving wheel carries an object on its cir- 
cumference much more rapidly than the same ob- 
ject could be made to move at its axis, and it is 
this rapidity of motion which tears, disintegrates, 
and destroys. It is the same motion which is 
evil in the cyclone, that vibrates in healthful, 
rhythmic, peaceful activity in a gentle breeze. 

Truth is at the center where all is silent, and 
he who abides near it escapes the storms that 



IIO E VOL UTION OF IMMOR TALIT Y. 

devastate life. He who turns his back on truth 
and departs from it is approaching the circum- 
ference of being, where increasing vibrations of 
passion will soon destroy him. Evil increases 
outwardly, but truth and wisdom unite in the tem- 
perate zones of man's being, where love grows to 
completeness. The serpent is the heat, fire, pas- 
sion of the blood; it is force, violence ; but within 
wisdom is latent, coiled, hidden in the dark re- 
cesses of man's great deep, his love nature. 

Imagine the human form a sphere with the soul 
its center, in the region of digestion, in the prov- 
ince of love. This is where the waters of the 
animal nature are divided from the waters of the 
human nature, the soul, or ego, being the power 
which controls and regulates each. The higher, 
human nature is luminous, and in it are love, 
truth, and wisdom, while below is an abyss where 
the Venom Queen of passion reigns, and mon- 
sters serpentine and slimy spit venom to corrupt 
the blood and inflame the mind. In these turbid 
waters all evil generates and becomes strong and 
powerful in mankind. 

All forms of life generate in water, and from it 
we ascend, and entering into the blood of our 



PLATE I. 




The Ovum at three weeks. 



THE WISDOM OF THE SERPENT. Ill 

parents, fire them with lust to the begetting of 
ourselves. But the first microscopic form we as- 
sume in the dark recesses of our mother's body 
is the form of a serpent. (See Plate I.) 

In illustration of this interesting and suggestive 
subject the following cuts and descriptions, from 
the work of Louis Crusius, A.M., M.D., are sub- 
joined. In description of the different appear- 
ances of the foetus during pregnancy he says : — 

11 During the first week the ovum remains in 
the fallopian tube. . . . Having entered the upper 
part of the tube and become impregnated, it 
slowly moves down, in the meantime beginning 
its process of repeated division or cleavage known 
as the ' segmentation of the ovum.' At about 
the eighth day the ovum enters the uterus." (See 
Plate I.) " Here we have the serpent at three 
weeks from conception. Fourth week or end of 
first month the entire ovum is about the size of a 
pigeon's egg, measuring about three quarters of 
an inch in its greatest diameter, and weighing in 
the neighborhood of forty grains. The entire 
chorion is covered by villi. The umbilical vesicle 
is fully developed. The embryo measures about 
one third of an inch in length and resembles a 



112 E VOL UTION OF IMMOR TALIT Y. 

small, thick worm curled up. While in the pre- 
vious week the embryo was still erect, it now is 
flexed to such an extent that the head and tail 
meet and the outline of the back resembles a 
circle. The eyes appear as two black dots and 
the limbs are indicated by two pairs of bud-like 
processes. The caudal extremity projects as a 
free tail and upon the back on each side of the 
median line are mapped out the provertebrae, a 
series of quadrilateral areas." 

Behold him now encircling a globe, the body 
around the soul, the circumstances of mortal life 
with which the human beine has to contend. 
Here is the serpent with his tail in his mouth, or 
near enough to suggest time and consciousness 
without beginning or end. Thus does nature 
testify to the truth of the drama of creation. 
The serpent typifies that third principle which 
separates duality and becomes one side of 
the A. 

Adam and Eve represent duality ; ignorance, 
blindness, incompleteness, but the introduction of 
the serpent completes the trinity of animate life, 
adding intellect, which leads man out of the nar- 
row confines of a garden into the boundless ex- 



PLATE II. 




The Ovum at one month. 



THE WISDOM OF THE SERPENT. 113 

panse of a world of possibilities. The sugges- 
tion to "become as gods" fires ambition, kindles 
desire, enlarges the horizon, and increases the 
light of mind, whereby he scans the universe of 
which he is center and creator. Human life is 
enclosed in the circle of necessity, of whose area 
a slight segment only is dimly perceived. To 
become immortal is to know it all, and to be able 
to pass its boundaries and mingle with the super- 
natural, where necessity is unknown or non-ex- 
istent. 

The analogy between the serpent, or spirit of 
wisdom, and the Christ Spirit, the Son of Man, 
the only-begotten of Love, is plainly indicated. 
Both signify the miraculous powers in man. The 
serpent exists in the first embryonic form that 
man assumes, and is constantly transformed in 
form, feature, and expression as the growth pro- 
gresses. Moreover, the fact that the serpent was 
the third actor in the drama of the so-called fall 
of man, even as Christ is the third Person in the 
Godhead, shows a still farther connection. Nor 
does the resemblance cease here ; both healed 
the sick and both were "lifted up," as Jesus testi- 
fies, saying, "As Moses lifted up the serpent in 



114 E VOL UTION OF IMMOR TAUT Y. 

the wilderness, even so shall the Son of Man be 
lifted up." 

Jesus was tempted in " the wilderness," and 
fiery serpents stung the children of Israel in " the 
wilderness." This wilderness signifies the arid 
wastes of passion which produce no living thing. 
The " fiery serpents" of passion unrestrained by 
reason are not *' lifted up" by the conscious 
knowledge of their sacredness or use in the hu- 
man economy. They crawl in the dirt and seek 
holes and dark places in which to hide from the 
light. Passion purified and elevated by reason 
and culture becomes love, a synonym for light, 
life, and immortality, the kingdom of heaven in 
man, where dwells the Holy Ghost, the Christ, 
and the Father. Placed on a standard, " ele- 
vated," the serpent healed those bitten by ser- 
pents. 

The rod of Moses changed the dust into lice, 
turned the waters of the Nile to blood, and parted 
the floods of the Red Sea. This rod of Moses, a 
straight stick, symbol of the ego, the letter /, 
what was it but the numeral one (i), a straight 
line like those the schoolboy makes as a symbol 
of the beginning of that long journey of knowl- 



THE WISDOM OF THE SERPENT. 



"5 



edge the end of which, after countless zigzags, 
results in perfection, the completion of numbers 
(10), a return to or union with the circle? The 
ego becomes one with the all, the soul blends 
with its circumference. This miracle-working 
rod, cast on the ground, became a serpent before 
which even Moses fled in fear. 

(There is an Arcana of the serpent which is un- 
veiled only to initiates.) 

This rod is a small section of that straight line, 
the first dimension of space, which is changed 
into a circle in its projection around the universe. 
Within this circle are limitations of law which the 
wisdom of the serpent ignores, showing man his 
power by reason and knowledge to pass beyond 
the circle in a never-ending progress into the infi- 
nite and ineffable wisdom, where he is a law to 
himself. 

Those under external law are wise only in part, 
and this wisdom is the result of the union of the 
soul (the center) with the Christ, the all-embrac- 
ing Circumference. Those who fully rise up to free 
contact with this elongated rod (O) can work mira- 
cles like Moses, and overcome death like Jesus. 

Immortality cannot be conferred by any extra- 



I 1 6 E VOL UTION OF IMMOR TALIT V. 

neous power whatever. It is not a gift, like a 
garment, but is a transformation of the entire 
man from the crooked and angular into the or- 
derly, harmonious, and beautiful. This is effected 
by patience, constant effort, and love ; " and the 
greatest of these is love." This is the work of 
the man himself, and can be accomplished by no 
other. Christ is within, and if we are unconscious 
of his presence it is because of that stupidity 
which comes when " men love darkness rather 
than light." Men dislike to think deeply on this 
subject, but he who loves thought comes to the 
circumference where true wisdom is to be attained. 
The ego, that which thinks and knows, is man, 
and the son of man is begotten by this thinking, 
knowing principle of the soul, in an ecstasy of 
bliss and an indescribable increase of mercy and 
love. 

Physically man is a trinity of Adam, Eve, and 
the serpent, but spiritually transformed he be- 
comes God, the Holy Ghost, and Christ. Paul 
indicates this truth when he says, " The first man 
Adam, was a living soul ; but Christ, the second 
man Adam, is a quickening spirit." 

Physically the serpent is a venomous reptile, 



THE WISDOM OF THE SERPENT. I I 7 

but spiritually he is the winged seraph, a throng 
of which Isaiah saw around the throne, shouting, 
"Holy! Holy!" etc. So the sacred bulls, long 
worshiped in Egypt as the incarnation of Osiris, 
representing the vir of animal passion, the cre- 
ative principle of the physical world, are spiritu- 
ally the winged cherubim of Exodus. Moses, 
instructed in the magical lore of Egypt, con- 
structed the ark of the covenant to embody in 
visible form some principles of the Egyptian cult. 

The mercy seat was placed in the ark " above 
the law," suggestive of the superiority of mercy ; 
and at each end of the mercy seat was an image 
of the sacred bull, the two cherubim, facing each 
other, their outstretched wings covering the 
mercy seat, in the shadow of which and between 
them the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob 
was wont to commune with Moses. 

(More of this Arcana is contained in a Rosi- 
crucian manual permitted only to brothers of the 
Third Degree. I may say that it is entitled " The 
Mystery of the Serpent, or the Divine Quater- 
nary.") 

It is evident that the command to Adam not to 
eat of the fruit of a certain tree had reference to 



Il8 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY. 

sexual acts from the nature of the curse put upon 
Eve for disobedience. The fall of Adam was a 
change in the blood from a pure, non-passional 
condition into an inflamed and lustful one, wherein 
conception and child-bearing were greatly multi- 
plied, together with its sorrows and pains. Why 
the Jewish bloody sacrifices as atonement for sin 
in the old dispensation and the blood of Christ in 
the new ? Blood is a symbol, and in it occurs a 
divine transformation by the quickening of it, 
changing it from a passional serpent state into 
the angelic, where blood is not red with passion. 

All physical objects are composed of light. 
The colors of vegetation, of rock, hills, and floods, 
of all conceivable things, are precipitated light, 
and these colors return to light through fire, or 
the "quickening" of motion. They are corre- 
spondencies of spiritual activities. The sun cor- 
responds to the spiritual sun within, the soul, 
which radiates ineffable light. This light is the 
Christ, the life, whose work is the transformation 
of the blood into a force which corresponds to 
electricity in power, absence of color, and rapidity 
of vibration. 

What is this that flies more rapidly than light, 



THE WISDOM OF THE SERPENT. 119 

from the center to the circumference of creation, 
from pole to pole, from star to star, and reaches 
even the throne of God, questioning the great / 
am face to face, even as did Moses ? It is mind, 
typified by the serpent. It derives its strength 
and power to penetrate all mysteries and search 
out secret places by the desire for knowledge. 
Desire creates and sustains motion, from which 
hunger is born, which in turn builds anew by its 
satisfaction the wasted tissues of the body. 

When the freedom of spirit is limited by law 
the hunger of desire is born. To investigate, to 
see, to go out into the new and untried, the for- 
bidden that lies beyond, are necessary to growth 
and the evolution and expansion of mind. Under 
law man is limited to a garden. It may contain 
all that is necessary to the vegetative life, but the 
breath of the living soul breathed into man longs 
for the freedom of the infinite expanse from 
which it came into the limitations of humanity. 
It needs only the temptation conveyed in a dream, 
the flight of a passing bird, any slight suggestion 
of freedom to tempt him to disregard the law of 
" Thou shalt not." The beginning of mind is in 
a question, the desire of knowledge, a motion 



I 20 E VOL UTION OF IMMOR TALITY. 

that shall never end. Sent out into the void from 
a tiny center, it makes its serpentine way through 
chaos, measuring an eternity of time and an infin- 
ity of space around which it makes its tortuous 
way home, laden with the knowledge which is the 
answer to its questions. 

Temptation incites to effort and helps progress. 
Without hunger food is tasteless, and without 
taste the stomach would be overfilled. Desire 
produces taste, and taste is the discriminating 
power of mind which declares things to be good 
or evil. Temptation to overeat depends on the 
taste, but the temperate use of food is regulated 
by the judgment, which is of the mind and will. 
This illustrates the fall of the physical man from 
health into disease, and the birth of mind results 
from pain, which is caused by a change in the 
blood, or disease. Pain forces man to think, and 
this is the force that explores the abyss and dis- 
covers the true and the false. The serpent, in 
giving God credit for knowing the result of dis- 
obedience, accuses Him at the same time of de- 
ception. 

God said, " In the day thou eatest thereof thou 
shalt surely die " ; but the serpent said, " Ye shall 



THE WISDOM OF THE SERPENT 12 1 

not surely die, for God doth know that in the day 
ye eat thereof your eyes shall be opened and ye 
shall be as gods, knowing good and evil." After 
the success of the tempter God said, " Behold 
the man is become as one of us, to know good 
and evil, and lest he put forth his hand and take 
also of the tree of life and eat and live for- 
ever," etc. Right here is the advent of truth and 
falsehood, the beginning of a ceaseless warfare, 
in which man is both field of battle and prize. 
The soul affirms but the mind denies, challenging 
investigation and experiment to find the truth. 
This story, literally understood, is far from compli- 
mentary to the character of the God who figures 
in it. He is represented as working blindly and 
being angry at His own failures. Man is a play- 
thing, a toy, created for His glory ; an automaton 
whose antics are sufficient to provoke " the inex- 
tinguishable laughter of Godhead." 



122 E VOL U TION OF IMMOR TALIT Y. 



CHAPTER VII. 

CHRIST, THE LIGHT OF IMMORTALITY. 

Light dawned in man with disobedience. Our 
physical eyes are merely images of the spiritual 
forms of perception, as sunlight symbolizes the 
light of spirit. Imagination is the spiritual eye, 
and by it are all discoveries made. When man's 
eyes were opened his horizon enlarged, and the 
area of the exercise of his powers was limited 
only by that horizon. He could no longer be 
limited by " the garden," a child restrained by 
fear, a slave to any power but that of his own 
choice. He entered a new and wider life, and is 
henceforth become his own providence. God no 
longer clothes him as He does the lilies of the 
field, nor is he fed like the birds of the air. Un- 
aided and alone, he must produce for himself. 
This is the price of knowledge and freedom. 

Physical slavery is grievous, but it is a slight 
misfortune compared with mental and spiritual 
bondage. The mind which gathers truth by ob- 



CHRIST, THE LIGHT OF IMMORTALITY. 1 23 

servation and investigation is free, but the mind 
which reflects only the opinions of others is in 
bondage to those opinions. He is a creed-bound 
slave, confined in his little garden by the com- 
mand " thou shalt not" think, for fear of the 
consequences, who wears his opinions as he does 
his garments, things which are the work of other 
hands and brains. Such souls shut the illimitable 
universe out and bury themselves in the tombs of 
their forefathers, breathing over and again the 
mephitic vapors of decay and death, through fear 
of man's greatest boon, freedom of thought. 
The pure breath of spirit blows over the moun- 
tain of thought, the quickening power of the 
Christ. It cleanses the blood of its sluggish 
vapors, changes the red lust color, and wafts the 
soul to the throne of the Great God. 

Passion and love of self are fruitful sources of 
disease, but the serpent of sensuality, lifted up, 
placed on a standard of high thought and action, 
something to be looked up to for help, a power 
having a divine use in the world of humanity, is 
for the healing of the nations. It is no longer 
the serpent of lust but the holy spirit of love that 
" casteth out fear," for " fear is torment." 



124 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY. 

We only know that Christ is within us when 
we have an experience which demonstrates His 
presence in the soul. We beget the Son of man 
by an effort of will in love. He is the light of 
love and cannot be begotten of fear. That light 
can never be confounded with the smoke and 
vapor which is the issue of passional love. If 
you would have that light lift up your love, set it 
on a standard above even your powers of attain- 
ment, and never let it fall into the dust and degra- 
dation of lust. Feed its fires with noble thought 
and constant efforts to become more and more 
worthy, merciful, charitable, gentle, and lovely, for 
this is the Christ begotten in the soul. The light 
of love illuminates even the physical blood, puri- 
fying and permeating it with joy and peace. It 
is thus we grow wings to the soul. . There is 
neither doubt nor fear in the soul filled with the 
light of love. It bears healing in its wings and 
makes man superior to the evils of life and the 
circumstance of death. In it is the germ of 
immortality, that instinct which recoils from the 
presence of death and prophesies of eternal being 
beyond the change of form. 

From the cradle to the grave man's work, as 



CHRIST, THE LIGHT OF IMMORTALITY. 1 25 

we perceive it, is the manipulation of matter, but 
after countless ages of experiences he is still 
pausing at the first letter of the alphabet, in which 
is concealed the knowledge how to control the 
matter of his body. Yet it is here that he must 
learn the lesson of immortality. To produce a 
body at will ; to increase or retard the circulation 
of the blood ; to expand and contract nerves and 
muscles ; to concentrate vitality at any given 
point ; to increase or decrease sensation in the 
whole or any part of the body ; these are some of 
the evidences of immortality. 

Man has no cause to boast of his manhood or 
the power of his will until he can control more of 
himself than his muscles and his fists. He must 
control digestion and the motions of the bowels 
by thought and will, that non-turbulent, steady, 
persuasive power of the regenerated will. Those 
who can accomplish this have already taken a 
stride on the road of power. Here and there are 
those who can withdraw the soul from the body, 
leaving it senseless and inert clay for a time, 
while the true man wanders abroad over the chart- 
less ocean of spirit. One step further and the 
physical body shall also be made to pass into the 



126 E VOL UTION OF IMMOR TALIT Y. 

unseen, to appear and disappear at the will of the 
one to whom it belongs, and of whom it is a part. 

Will controls matter, love controls the will, and 
the true man controls his love. Immortality is of 
the whole man ; he cannot be saved in pieces, 
neither can half of a man become immortal. The 
way to immortality is in the body, but no form 
remains fixed. The immortal have power to 
change forms at will. Form limits freedom. 
Forms of thought imprison the mind as the body 
holds the spirit. Those who are free in thought 
think little of forms of thought that are hoary 
with age. The tendency of form is to lie down, 
to be prone and quiet, while spirit is vibrating 
with ascensive buoyancy and motion. 

Life-giving, immortalizing, religious thought 
when formulated soon becomes enwrapped in cer- 
emonies which become automatic, and the ecstasy 
of individual experience of its exaltation turns to 
a cold and barren public duty. So it is with the 
form which we call man. The free soul ignores 
form, or regards it as a hindrance ; and the cults 
which teach that its power can be lessened by 
opposing and denying its legitimate demands but 
seek a way from the soul into freedom. The 



CHRIST, THE LIGHT OF IMMORTALITY. 1 27 

body is a sacred edifice, the temple of the living 
God, and He only may change and dissolve it. 

If man were to withdraw himself wholly from 
the body at death, it would vanish like a vapor. 
Death is only a partial withdrawal, for as long as 
the thought of the form remains, something of the 
body will hold together. A partial withdrawal of 
the man is demonstrated in sleep and in trance. 

Jesus possessed the power wholly to withdraw 
from the body, and it vanished into the invisible 
world. He passed through the form of death to 
show the world the dominion of man over the 
forces of form, both of organization and disor- 
ganization. The light of the Christ shone out 
preeminently in the man Jesus, who affirmed that 
of himself he could do nothing, that it was the 
Father working in him, and that those who believe 
in the Father should do greater works. 

The spirit within himself and without he recog- 
nized as a creative, loving presence, the Christ, 
by whom and through whom he worked, suffered, 
and died. That " he did not many mighty works " 
in some localities shows the deficiency of the 
Christ spirit in the aura of those places. His 
prayer in the garden of Gethsemane, the an- 



128 E VOL UTION OF IMMOR TALITY. 

nouncement, "Thy faith hath made thee whole," 
his feeling that "virtue had gone out of him" at 
the touch of the diseased woman, and especially 
his cry on the cross, "My God! my God! why 
hast thou forsaken me ? " all go to prove that he 
recognized a power within and without greater 
than himself, with which he was intimately con- 
nected. 

Human nature is changeable and cannot furnish 
a permanent abiding place for the Christ spirit, 
and in the absence of it Jesus the man " cried 
out with a loud voice and gave up the ghost." 
But the Holy One could not see corruption, and 
when its object was so far accomplished, the 
Christ spirit again took up the body of the man 
Jesus, and after exhibiting it to the disciples on 
several occasions, caused its permanent disappear- 
ance. 

We of the Rosy Cross hold that the Christ 
is begotten in us by the union of the soul with 
that all-embracing energy which ebbs and flows 
throughout conscious being. We also hold that 
it is no respecter of persons, but is born in every 
soul that loves, believes, and wills its presence. 
The Christ is called the Son of man because it is 



CHRIST, THE LIGHT OF IMMORTALITY. 1 29 

begotten by the love of man for God and his 
brethren. 

When Jesus alluded to death it was the physical 
fact with which we are acquainted. To the Jews 
he said, " Your fathers did eat manna in the wil- 
derness and they are dead." There is no spiritual 
death ; the breath of God cannot die. The sal- 
vation Jesus taught was of this world, being free- 
dom from pain, disease, and death. He affirmed 
that he would lay down his life, but none could 
take it without his consent. 

Christ speaking in Jesus says, " He that believ- 
eth on me shall not die ; and though he were 
dead yet shall he live again." To believe with 
the heart is to do and to be. The fact that Jesus 
spent thirty years of his life like an ordinary man 
and then fasted forty days and nights alone on 
the mountain proves that he was not exempt from 
the struggle all must know who would evolve 
within themselves the immortal Christ, the Son 
of man. 



I3O EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY. 




THE ROSY CROSS. 

The origin of the Rosy Cross is known only to 
the oldest initiates of the order. Its symbols are 
as ancient as the Egyptian Mysteries and its princi- 
ples underlie all religions, ancient and modern. 
In modern times the names of Christian Rosen- 
krutz, Robert Fludd and Francis Bacon have 
figured prominently in its literature ; but historically, 
there are few exoteric landmarks of the Order. 

Rosicruciae is spiritual, not material ; a Fraternity 
rather than an Order. Its members are gathered 
from the East and the West, from among the lofty 
and the lowly, the learned and the unlearned, 
wherever there are free souls, and sympathetic 
and aspiring natures. It embraces all ages, races 
and climes, and reaches from the visible far into 
invisible realms of being. Silence, secrecy and 
unpretending good works are its characteristics, 
and one member may pass his life next door to 



THE ROSY CROSS. I3I 

another and neither be aware of the bond between 
them unless some stress of need draw the curtain 
aside. The law of Silence is particularly empha- 
sized, obedience to the injunction to " enter into 
the closet and shut the door" being imperative 
on all who would have access to the sources of 
power. 

Each age calls for restatements of truth, specially 
adapted to its understanding and use, and the pres- 
ent age is no exception. That which was hidden 
from the ignorant and vicious under symbols and 
figures in the past is emerging from its outgrown 
shell so that he who runs may read. The veil of 
Isis has become a misty cloud, destined to disappear 
in the broader light of the coming century, and 
while the Rosy Cross has its lodges, passwords 
and signs, these external forms are regarded with 
indifference by the genuine Rosicrucian, who is 
aware that he can become a complete epitome of 
the Order only through development of its prin- 
ciples within himself. 

While the Rosy Cross has no creeds or dogmas 
to which the initiate must subscribe, there are 
certain principles which all true Rosicrucians ac- 
cept. Among them is belief in the impartial 



I32 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY. 

Fatherhood of God and the universal Brotherhood 
of Man, thus recognizing the Unity of Spirit in all 
manifestations of Life. 

Reincarnation is generally accepted as a truth, 
and salvation is the freedom of the soul from 
successive embodiments in earthy forms, wherein 
pain and pleasure alternate ; where the glow of 
genius is dimmed by the darkened understanding 
of age, and the flame of passion is quenched by 
the chill of disease and death. 

Humanity desires happiness, but none ever 
fully attains it, because it is sought in individual 
conditions and possessions, while it can be gained 
only through the uplifting of all souls everywhere. 
Life is homogeneous, and perfect rest will come to 
the individual soul only when the soul of the race 
is at rest. Therefore, whatever makes for the 
kingdom of heaven among men is the way to hap- 
piness for the individual. Men and women are 
born free and equal, but each one comes imme- 
diately into conditions destructive of freedom 
and equality, — conditions which man himself has 
created in the evolutionary processes of thought 
and life. He binds himself with creeds, forms 
and codes of action which divide man from man, 



THE ROSY CROSS, 1 33 

create the iron bondage of caste, and limit freedom 
of thought by fear. 

The recognition of universal brotherhood, and 
of the truth that all are entitled to equal rights 
and privileges in the house of the Common Father 
and Mother, is an important step in the path the 
soul must travel toward the perfected life. 

The cult of the Rosy Cross embraces the culture 
of the whole man, and this is carried on through 
vibrations set up in the emotional or soul nature 
by the Will. These vibrations exalt and expand 
the energies of the soul, and this culture is the 
work of salvation, which is not freedom from con- 
sequences, but deliverance from evil desires and 
tendencies. That which is recorded cannot be 
erased, but a new record may be made which will 
cast the old into the limbo of forgotten things. 

The past belongs to God, with all its failures 
and sins ; but the future is man's to mould, and 
fashion as he will, for himself and for the race. 

Vibrations may be indefinitely transferred by 
oral or mental suggestion, and the instructed 
soul consciously arouses, excites and directs the 
thoughtless and ignorant through vibrations. Ig- 
norance unguards the soul, furnishing conditions 



1^4 % V° L U TI0N 0F I MM OR TALI TV. 

of receptivity to good and evil suggestions, which 
uplift or degrade. Mind responds to mind, soul 
to soul, spirit to spirit, through vibrations in the 
ether. 

The invisible world of spirit is drawing near to 
the earth-plane, and the souls of men respond 
wherever they are sensitive to etheric vibrations. 
The Rosy Cross has long sensed this incoming 
spiritual tide and confidently expects the breaking 
away of the clouds of ignorance which have long 
obscured the light of the inner heavens. The 
pyramids, the buried cities, the tombs and moun- 
tain retreats of the old world are giving up their 
long hoarded secrets to the push and enterprise 
of the age ; but their wealth of knowledge and 
wisdom, though grand and wonderful, sinks into 
insignificance when compared with the treasures 
of the kingdom concealed in the soul of man ready 
to be revealed for use. This is the Kingdom of 
Heaven which is taken by force, the force of per- 
sistent desire and effort. 

Thoughts are not things, — they are greater 
than things. Thought is the energy, the inherent 
force of things, and comes from the Primal Intelli- 
gence which is above and beyond all things. The 



THE ROSY CROSS. 1 35 

mind is an instrument manipulated by unseen, but 
not altogether unknown forces. Its energies do 
not belong to us ; they are lent for use, and the 
only merit which we can claim because of superior 
adaptability of the instruments is in the quality of 
their use. 

The power to project this force or energy of the 
soul is inherent in human nature, and a depart- 
ment of the Rosy Cross culture is devoted to in- 
struction and training in its use. To vibrate the 
etheric atoms of the body is to set in motion the 
ether of space ; to exercise the Will in breathing 
is to connect with the space of Will, charging the 
body with electricity, power and life ; but the fer- 
vent desire to attain to any condition sets in vibra- 
tion the finer essences of spirit that connect with 
the soul of the universe, the Infinite Love. Every 
aspiring soul reaches some plane in spirit that 
corresponds to itself, and which it can absorb and 
use. 

There are Seven Spaces of Spirit corresponding 
to the Seven Great Powers, — four Mundane and 
three Spiritual, or psychic. Those corresponding 
to the Mundane Powers are, — Mineral, Vegetable, 
Animal, Human ; the Spiritual Spaces are, — Faith, 



I36 E VOL UTION OF IMMOR TALIT Y. 

Will, and Love. All the spaces are rilled with 
Societies, Orders, Associations, Brotherhoods, 
which correspond to every condition possible to 
man. Connection with the beings inhabiting 
these spaces may be attained by systematic train- 
ing and effort. This is not mediumship, so called, 
but the entering into and possession of the knowl- 
edge and power of the space contacted. Man, 
body and soul, is the Temple of the Infinite Spirit, 
and in him are etheric atoms belonging to all 
spiritual states and spaces ; some active, some 
latent. Those which are active connect the indi- 
vidual with the space with which he has the closest 
affinity, and the influx from it is largely uncon- 
scious. To illustrate : Beethoven was by nature 
affiliated with the Musical Societies and, being a 
fine instrument attuned to the inspirations of that 
space, he holds the world entranced by super- 
human melodies. Socrates contacted the Philo- 
sophical space, Napoleon, the Strategic ; but the 
full soul of the Prophet of Galilee came forth from 
and breathed the inspiration of the most interior 
space, the space of Love. 

To aspire is to become, in time and in eternity ; 
for aspiration connects the soul with the spaces of 



THE ROSY CROSS. 1 37 

spirit vibrating with immortal energies. Man 
makes and unmakes himself; " He fails, sickens 
and dies through feebleness of will." Physical 
life is only a series of vibrations whose intensity 
may be greatly increased by persistent use of 
spiritual forces. 

Degrees of soul-force depend on the rapidity of 
the vibrations of the flame uniting the three 
powers which constitute the human ego. This 
trinity of Intelligence, Will, and Love is a manifes- 
tation of the Divine Trinity in Unity, making of 
man a microcosmic God. 

The soul is a glowing spark in an Infinite 
Flame. 

The vibrations of these triune forces develop heat, 
which is generally diffused throughout the body 
as a gentle warmth. This heat may be power- 
fully increased and drawn to a center in the breast, 
where it burns with a pure and conscious flame. 
This is the baptism with fire and the Holy Ghost 
( Geist, Spirit) and is typified by the fire kept burn- 
ing on the altars of the ancient temples. It is 
also the transmuting fire of the Rosicrucians, 
which certain of the old alchemists misunder- 
stood and materialized to mean the transmutation 
of the baser metals into gold. 



I38 E VOL U TION OF IMMOR TAUT Y. 

This flame in the breast is an evidence of the 
Christ-union, the seal of immortality, and is pos- 
sible only to the pure in heart. To the impure 
and unholy, the increase of spirit vibrations fills 
the soul with an unquenchable thirst and an in- 
satiable hunger, which destroy soul and body by a 
slow combustion of unrest, impure desires, disease 
and death. This flame is the point of contact 
with the source of all power and knowledge, and 
sometimes it finds a voice. With Moses it objec- 
tified in the form of a burning bush, and the " still 
small voice " of spirit became audible to the ex- 
ternal ear. 

Referring to this flame the great Persian sage, 
Zoroaster, says, " When you see the fire, listen for 
the voice of the fire." 

This inner fire burned with conscious power 
when the disciples walked with the risen Jesus on 
the way to Emmaus. " Did not our hearts burn 
within us, while he spake to us on the way?" 

It has well-nigh ceased to burn on the altars of 
human hearts, but the Rosy Cross has preserved 
a spark of it and now calls to the wise virgins, 
whose lamps are trimmed and burning, to unveil 
the light for the illumination of the world. 



THE ROSY CROSS. 



139 



Love is the only antidote for Evil ; force will 
suppress, but will not prevent it. The peaceful, 
gentle, forgiving vibrations of love open the in- 
visible spaces from which descends purifying and 
regenerative power. Through the vibrations of 
love, war will cease, crime and its vindictive pun- 
ishment will pass away, and practical help will 
supersede sermons, prayers, and the legal re- 
straints with which society now ignorantly strives 
to protect itself. Crime should be prevented 
rather than punished, criminal tendencies detected, 
undermined, and destroyed, and the transmission 
of criminal instincts rendered impossible. All this 
may be done through spiritual vibrations, and this 
is one of the fields of work which specially en- 
gages the attention and efforts of the Rosy Cross. 

The concentration of effort and the union of 
many minds in one vibration creates societies, 
sects, governments, on the plane of its action ; in 
the same way spirit, by projection , creates and de- 
stroys. Spirit individualized in a human body 
is no less spirit than when disrobed. There are 
conclaves in the spaces of spirit in which the souls 
of men and women who are still of the mundane 
world take part, equally with those who have cast 



I40 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY. 

off the body. Convocations are held where the 
interests of earth-life are represented by those in 
earth-bodies who, in soul projection, are in the 
spiritual spaces, and questions touching human 
interests most nearly are considered. Such a con- 
vention, giving exclusive attention to the applica- 
tion of the great principles of sex, has long been 
in session. It has removed the ban of silence 
from woman, and caused her equality with man to 
be recognized in many ways; but the projection of 
this truth into the external world has been difficult, 
owing to the prejudices and superstitions of men. 
Rosicrucm invites woman's cooperation and 
has made her eligible to its councils and helpful 
influences on the same terms as her brothers ; it 
now boldly proclaims the feminine principle as 
embodied in woman to be the Saviour of the Race. 
Being the most spiritual, she is the vibratory 
center between God and man. Through her ele- 
vation in the thought, will, and love of man, the 
influx of crime, lust, and disease from the lowest 
hells will be checked, and the incarnation of lofty 
and pure souls will be facilitated. This can only 
be accomplished by the cooperation of the visible 
world of souls with the invisible. 



THE ROSY CROSS. 141 

Sex is of the body, soul, and spirit, and is as 
eternal as is the Creative Power, for by and through 
its principles all things exist. Its activities are 
always creative, for generation on one plane 
creates another plane similar but a little higher. 
Vibrations of the body are the result of vibrations 
of spirit, which they involve, and all vibrations are 
creative in accord with their plane of activity. 
Sound vibrations reach the ear, thought vibrations 
the mind ; but the powerful and far-reaching vibra- 
tions of emotion move the soul, and the motion is 
infinitely sustained. 

Love is the creative center ; and the vibrations 
that harmonize the conditions, interior or exterior, 
of each individual, are generated at that center. 
It is the love of one, not of many ; for all sincere 
and genuine Rosicrucians are monogamists. 

Love in the physical has its correspondence in 
the spiritual nature, — it is one, for Love is Spirit, 
and all its vibrations are creative. What we name 
matter is an effect produced by spirit transform- 
ing itself through vibratory motion. 

Nature makes no mistakes ; she is the word of 
God to which nothing can be added or taken away 
by man, except to his own hurt. The separation 



I42 EVOLUTION OF IMMORTALITY. 

of the masculine and feminine in thought, emo- 
tion, or physical life, is destructive, not construc- 
tive. In their perfect blending on all planes, lies 
the secret of power, and the Lost Word is unity 
— one. 

The natural use of the organs of the body, as 
of the faculties of the mind and powers of the 
soul, is an imperative duty to all who would per- 
fect the human nature. The orderly exercise of 
mind and will is required to preserve the har- 
monious balance of being, so that life on all planes 
shall march together in orderly sequence. 

To be self-poised and perfect in rhythmic motion, 
like the worlds swinging in space, is the preroga- 
tive of every human being ; but only those who 
have found the center, and lighted the flame on 
that altar, approach that condition. It is not at- 
tained by ignoring the selfhood or in disuse of 
the functions of body or mind. 

The Rosy Cross makes no noise ; it loves the 
Infinite Silence, and works through vibrations of 
Thought, Will, and Love. It is ready to point 
out the path and to clasp hands with any who 
desire to work for the advent of the new civiliza- 
tion. To this end, the fraternity desires souls 



THE ROSY CROSS. 1 43 

rather than money; earnest, active, sincere stu- 
dents and workers. Not all who knock can enter. 
Before one can become a member of the visible 
Fraternity, he or she is already enrolled among 
the Invisibles. 

" Not every one who saith Lord, Lord, can enter 
into the kingdom," saith the Christ, and one be- 
fore Him affirmed, " Many are the wand-bearers, 
but few are the true Bacchanals." 

Those who can recall the conditions of life fifty 
years ago will appreciate the gigantic strides man 
has made along the lines of progress. The twi- 
light of the stage-coach has broadened into the 
noonday of steam and electricity ; the inspiration 
of books has largely given place to scientific cer- 
tainties, to ascertained truths and facts of things, 
thus widening and deepening the scope of free 
thought. 

Dr. Franklin ushered in a new age, the age of 
electricity, when he called forth a message from 
the shadow of God which pronounced the death 
sentence on the limitations of matter, annihilating 
time and space by putting " a girdle around the 
earth in forty minutes," as prophesied by Shake- 
speare's tricky sprite. As the age of crude force 



1 44 E V0L VTION OF 1MM0R TALITY. 

merged into the electrical age, bringing with it 
everything worth preserving, so the wires and 
dynamos and circuits, which now witness to the 
external activities of man's restless intelligence, 
will give place to the simpler methods of the 
mental age, when the possibilities of mind will be- 
come manifest. The present laborious processes 
of education will become obsolete, and telepathy 
will take the place of the old, cumbrous methods 
of instruction in the imparting of knowledge. 

Daguerre pictured the outside of things fifty 
years ago ; modern photography reproduces the 
inside, and it is only a question of a little more 
time and a few more experiments when mental 
states will be photographed and man's nature will 
be mapped out, as physical geography maps the 
surface of the planet. The swamps and lagoons 
in human nature which send up the malaria that 
generates crime, disease, death, will be located, as 
will the life-giving seas and breezy, moral moun 
tain tops. Mind will be generated, rather than 
adipose tissue, and God will be enthroned in the 
heart of the world, rather than in some far-off 
anachronistic City of Gold. 

Speed characterizes the electrical age; let us 



THE ROSY CROSS. 1 45 

move quickly to help God save the world. He 
demands only the sacrifice of meanness, of enmity 
to our brother man ; and this is the only bar to 
infinite progress. 

No one can borrow the light of the Spirit. 
Each virginal lamp must shine by its own light, 
and each man stands or falls alone. " God helps 
those who help themselves." His tables are laden 
with flowers and fruits which are not forced on 
any one ; the command is, " Help yourself T 

Recognizing the value of organization for cer- 
tain work which is before us, the Western Cult of 
the Rosy Cross has established a bureau of in- 
struction, where those who desire to learn and 
work with the Fraternity may apply. 

Rosicrucle A. 
By order of Her who is Nameless. 



AUG 31 1900 



1 COPY DEL. TO CAT. DIY. 

oie. 1* 1901 



